Donald Levin's Blog, page 7

Indie Monday

Today’s guest: Diana Kathryn Plopa

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Every other Monday, I’ll be featuring other authors on my blog—authors who produce quality work outside the boundaries and strictures of the traditional mass-produced, mass-marketed commercial publishing world and traditional bookstore shelves.

Today’s featured guest is the multitalented novelist, memoirist, short-story writer, editor, publicist, publisher, writing coach, and television host Diana Kathryn Plopa. She holds a degree in English, with a concentration on creative composition, as well as a certification in early childhood development.  In addition to her published books described below, she has also edited several anthologies. She has worked as a features writer for a Detroit newspaper, wrote copy for several websites and blogs, and wrote copy for a popular Detroit radio program. She currently directs Pages Promotions, LLC, a Michigan-based marketing and publicity advocate working with independent authors to promote and present their books to the public. She also hosts Indie Reads TV, a new community access television program for southeastern Michigan.

 

Recently I posed some questions to Diana. Here’s what she told me.

DL: Diana, welcome. Could you tell us a little about yourself?

DKP: I’m a wife, mother, dog mom, and passionate person of the book.  I love the written word more than almost anything else. My muse is a small, invisible mallard duck named Drake, who has been with me since about age seven. Hot cocoa is my secret weapon, and snow is my kryptonite. I gain tremendous personal satisfaction from helping other Indie Authors reach a wider audience and I host a weekly television program just for that purpose. I’m an editor, Indie Publisher, and mentor to writers of nearly every age, stage, and genre, from school-age children to senior citizens. I believe cheese is a major food group. I encourage everyone to go on a hot air balloon ride, and go indoor skydiving at least once in their lifetime, because controlled chaos is a thing everyone should experience so they can write about it with acumen. I support building libraries in all towns with a population greater than one (if you live alone on a desert island, or in the middle of the woods, you should have a library of at least twenty books in your home at all times). When I’m not writing or reading, I love kayaking, playing with the dogs, bonfires, music, hiking in forests, swimming, and impromptu storytelling.

DL: Please tell us about your latest books and works in progress. Where did the ideas for those works come from?

DKP: It’s interesting to contemplate answering that question. The first thing that comes to mind is Neil Gaiman’s answer (YouTube it here, it’s priceless). And yet, I won’t dodge . . . for me, ideas come at me from every direction, and in nearly every moment of my day. No kidding. I once walked down a street with a friend in a part of East Lansing I’d never encountered. As we were walking, I saw a narrow blue door that led to an upstairs flat. It had a glass window that, because of the way the sun was hitting it, seemed to be opaque. I went home that afternoon and wrote a short story about that door and where it might lead and who or what might be on the other side. (I’m still waiting to figure out what to do with that piece, but I wrote it.) Truly, story ideas come from everywhere, at any moment.

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My book, Free Will, came from a very serious religious conversation about the Old Testament and the concept of free will on Earth, yet preordained destiny in the afterlife. That lead me down a “what if” path that ended with a giggle-fest. That story begged me to write it.

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A Tryst of Fate began as a collection of short stories that I thought might simply be a collection with perhaps a few of them working into a novella one day. Drake pointed out that they all followed a similar theme. Once I accepted that, Drake then suggested that I weave them together with a backstory, and TADA! A novel was born.

The novel I’m working on right now, Splinters, is a western; a genre that I thought would be outside of my reach, until you, Don, suggested that I take a crack at it anyway. See what happens when you plant a seed? It began as a thought experiment in your memoir writing workshop, and now it’s about thirty thousand words into a western adventure which I hope to release in December of this year. Who knew? Certainly not me!

Also in the works are a political thriller which Drake outlined late one night after several weary hours of the evening news and has accumulated about sixty-five thousand words already; a science fiction story that noodled its way into my imagination after a conversation with a psychologist about the concept of what might happen if a society implemented a program of extreme-anger management; an “alternative” historical piece that Drake insisted I outline while we were watching a National Geographic special in a hotel room in Muskegon the night before a book festival; and a children’s book about elephants that keeps needling at me since my mother’s death several years ago.

So, I guess, to answer your question, I find wayward ideas lingering in empty alleys, in philosophical conversations, in thought experiments, and in abandoned emotional warehouses in unspecified locations. Drake and I collect them, treat them gently, and sometimes they become stories that eventually grow into novels. I have neither control nor influence . . . although Drake tells me he can get me a great deal on a bestselling plot —if only I settle down and ignore everything else. I tell him, thanks, but just not yet. It’s too much fun to write lots of stories simultaneously. I can wait for stardom. But that doesn’t keep me from buying the occasional lottery ticket and dreaming about my lonely writer’s garret on an island off the coast of Greece with a plate of flaming cheese, a puppy at my feet, and a new novel in the works.

DL: Why do you write? What do you hope to accomplish with your writing?

DKP: I have a shirt that says, “I write for the same reason that I breathe; because if I didn’t, I would die.” That kind of sums up why I write. I think that if I ignored the ideas, shut Drake out of my head, and put down the pen and keyboard, I’d be an excruciatingly depressed person. This writing thing is what gives my life meaning and makes me feel whole.

As for what I want to accomplish, well, that answer has three parts. First, I write so I can turn off my brain at night and sleep. It sounds wacky, but it’s true. If I don’t get it on paper, it just nags at me and I don’t sleep. I’m sure there’s some psychotic diagnosis for that, but it has yet to be revealed. Second, I write to satiate a curious fascination with what genre might actually be my favorite. You see, I don’t know yet, what I like best of all. So, I’m on a quest to write one book in all thirty-three major genres. I think writing is a little like eating ice cream, you have to try all the flavors before you can declare a favorite. Finally, aside from sleeping, remaining sane, and feeding my own weird curiosity, I’d like to think that my writing contributes something positive to the lives of those who read my work. Perhaps it helps them fall asleep; maybe it tickles their brain with a thought they haven’t had before; maybe it inspires them to take a stab at writing themselves; or perhaps it just simply makes someone happy. I don’t really have any grandiose expectations for what my writing should do.However, above all else, I want to contribute something to the world library—be it good, or mediocre. I think there’s always room for more stories.

DL: Please talk a little about your writing process. What is your favorite part of the process? Least favorite?

DKP: I love the outline stage. That feeling of crafting something new, feeling out all the pieces, and putting them together to form a story is quite exhilarating for me. I love the actual writing part, too, because my brain goes to places sometimes that surprises me. I like that a lot. It’s a nifty thing to watch what appears on the screen and think to myself, “Wow, I’ve never had that thought before, that’s interesting.” The act of creation is fun beyond description.

As for my least favorite part?  I’m not a fan of implementing a new marketing program for each book. Yes, I write in several genres, so each book needs to be presented to readers differently. But that would be true even if I were to stick with only one genre. Books aren’t widgets, and they require different approaches to reach different readers. I understand that, but I’d much rather have a magic script that would entice people of every background and interest to buy every one of my books equally. That is a fantasy, of course. So, I have to do the work of marketing. Don’t get me wrong, I genuinely enjoy meeting readers; that’s not the tough part. The tough part is figuring out things like what tagline is going to be enticing, how should I write the back-cover blurb, what festival table display will catch the most interest, and what social media memes are going to draw the most attention. It’s an elusive magic formula that’s impossible to get right every time. Yeah, I’d much rather only work on writing or outlining the next book. But just like the “terrible twos” are part of raising children, and housebreaking is part of inviting a puppy into your life, marketing is part of writing books. You’ve got to do it. But it’s not my favorite part of the process.

DL: Could you reflect a bit on what writing or being a writer has meant for you and your life?

DKP: When I was a kid, we didn’t have a television in the houses for several years. It broke and my parents took their time replacing it. So we read—a lot. I fell madly in love with books. They were so much more exciting for me than television. I liked being able to imagine through the words, putting my own spin on it all. As I got older, I discovered that words were so much more powerful than anyone had ever let on. In elementary school, words were the only way I could understand math. I had a modicum of success with story problems. In middle school, my attention to detail and a large vocabulary rewarded me with good grades on research papers and lots of passes to the library, which is far better than sitting in a classroom, any day. In high school, I was part of the theatre program. Storytelling helped me fit in when I felt mostly awkward. I cultivated a boat load of friends. They all “got” it.  Storytellers . . . I’d found my tribe.

As an adult, working in the corporate environment, learning to weave words helped me land better jobs, make more money in those jobs, and garner more appreciation from my boss and coworkers. Working in journalism taught me the value of story and how story impacts lives. I’d found my calling. Now, helping others experience the same joy found in words and world creation, I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life.

DL:  Many thanks for joining us today, Diana. What are links to your books, website, and blog so readers can learn more about you and your work?

DKP: My author website is www.DKPWriter.com, and there’s a page there where people can read about my books, and order them in both print and ebook formats. For those die-hard Prime members, I also have an author page on Amazon.

My professional author website shares space with my Author Advocate and Publishing company website, www.PagesPromotions.com. There’s a lot going on in my little cyberspace, with tons of opportunities for readers to discover authors, and writers to discover literary services, including an episode schedule for Indie Reads TV, writing contests, community service projects, writer’s support groups, and so much more. I’ve even got a Blog Thingy page where I talk about writing craft things, post book reviews, and a host of other creative thoughts.

I’m a little exuberant with my level of engagement when it comes to bookish things, so don’t be too surprised at all the content. I welcome any and all contacts. I always give quarter, and never take prisoners.

Thank you for your kind invitation to share my story with you and your blog readers, Don. I genuinely appreciate it!

Two Poems about Summer

I haven’t been writing much poetry lately, but it wasn’t so long ago that I thought of myself exclusively as a poet. I had always written occasional poems—poetry for special occasions like weddings—but I identified as basically a fiction writer.

I came to love writing poetry, though . . . for the intense use of language,  of course, but also for the experience of writing a poem as opposed to a long work of prose, and most especially for the craft of poetry. I wrote a lot of poems, and they began appearing in print and e-journals, and I even brought out two small collections of poems.

I stopped for a variety of reasons, but mostly it was because I had to write a 300-plus page accreditation report for the school where I was teaching. It not only brought my poetry-writing and -publishing to a screeching halt, but it made me remember how much I enjoyed working in the marathon of the long prose form. So I started back to fiction.

I was reminded of all that this week when I saw a YouTube video by Michael Martin, a great friend and one of the most talented poets I know. In the video (you can watch it here), he reads two poems: his translation of a poem by Virgil and an original poem responding to the translation. Michael and I used to share poems with each other almost every day . . . one of us would churn one out and immediately send it off to the other for a response . . . we inspired and trusted each other.

Michael has continued writing poems, as well as lots of other things, and his video inspired me to drag a couple of my oldies out of the crypt for this week’s blog entry. The title of today’s post says, “Two Poems about Summer,” but of course they’re not really about summer. I picked them because they’re both set at exactly this time of year (August) and because they gave me the chance to revisit a couple of my favorites and share them with you.

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The first one, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” I reworked a bit from its original version, but the second, “Steve Allen Returns to Weekly TV,” is pretty much as it appeared first in the online publication Tryst and then in my first collection, In Praise of Old Photographs (Little Poem Press, 2005). (BTW, that handsome devil on the cover is my grandfather.)

Enjoy.

 

Et in Arcadia Ego

About suffering they were never wrong, 

The Old Masters; how well they understood

Its human position.

    —W.H. Auden

Standing waist deep in the water,

my older brother slaps a hand

on the surface of the startled round

blue sunny mouth of the above-ground pool

on the driveway in our back yard

to mark the seconds advancing

in the breath-holding contest.

Beside him, buoyant, his best friend

does a perfect dead-man’s float—

face down, arms outstretched, legs limp

and trailing in the water—

passing ninety-nine one-thousand

as tiny waves slosh over the edges

of the corrugated metal sides

burnishing a dark halo

in the sand cushioning the pool.

 

The day warm, the sky blue and cloudless

in Detroit in 1962.

 

“Aguirre on the mound,” announces

Ernie Harwell from the transistor

on the webbed chair beside the pool

where I am sitting, watching.

“Swing and a miss,” Harwell calls it

and a tinny approving murmur

issues from the ballpark’s August crowd

in the summer of my thirteenth year.

 

At once the door to the porch

off my brother’s second floor bedroom

flies open and our mother, stricken,

thrusts her head out. “Marilyn Monroe

died!” she cries, voice raspy from smoking,

her shocked grief compelling her

to notify someone, anyone, and

we are all she can find right now—

we for whom that churl death is still 

a stranger mocked by a boyish game

(“How long you can hold your breath,”

Death will chide back; “good practice for forever”),

unaware as we are this is how

it enters our lives, with the surprise 

burst of a swinging screen door.

 

Ears submerged but thinking from her tone

she is agitated about him,

the teenager still drifting face down

like a felled log lifts a calming hand

and sends her up an okay sign

while my brother keeps splashing his count—

up to one-hundred-twenty one-thousand—

as the cruel seconds race past.

 

 

Steve Allen Returns to Weekly TV (August 1967)

Lying shirtless and pantless in the heat

of an overwhelming Detroit summer

at the end of my seventeenth year

alone on an unmade narrow bed

watching the Steve Allen Show

through a murk of endless cigarettes

 

on a black and white TV with an unbent

hanger for an antenna, I imagined I dwelt

among the habitues of Hollywood Boulevard

who stopped along whatever path

they were traveling to stare into the red

eye of the camera trained on the street

 

for a slice of southern California life

primed to catch their random amblings

and report the findings out to America

for the amusement of the nation’s viewers

who, like me, laughed along with

the host’s high giggle and comic invention

 

of lives for ladies with shopping bags

bubbling over with ripe oranges

and hose drooping at thick ankles,

and crazy-eyed men with dirty

pants cinched with neckties bunched

around their waists, and young men

 

bare-chested as I was, raving

about the government’s intrusions

into their lives, and now and then

a man wearing, say, a shower cap

might wander down the street at the wrong

time and turn up on snowy screens

 

across the country, his story concocted

for the occasion, and what is amusing

about such desperation, you might ask,

and if you do then you must not be

staring down the maw of your eighteenth

birthday, or understand how

 

the dusk of LA is as desolate

as the cruel deserted nights of Detroit

or how a camera’s glare can peer into

the deepest fears of those who dream

their truest lives into being, or even

how these could converge with your own.

Indie Monday

Today’s guest: Thomas Galasso

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Every other Monday, I’ll be featuring other authors on my blog—authors who produce quality work outside the boundaries and strictures of the traditional mass-produced, mass-marketed commercial publishing world and traditional bookstore shelves.

Today’s featured guest is the multitalented author, musician, actor, and teacher Thomas Galasso. Thomas received his bachelor of arts in English from Wayne State University, and eventually earned a teaching certification in Secondary English, Speech, and Drama. He also received a master of arts in English from Marygrove College. He has been teaching in Detroit Public Schools for over twenty years. He worked on another certification, and now teaches kids with Autism. His “serious hobby” is playing guitar, bass, a little harmonica, and singing. Thomas is the author of a novel, When the Swan Sings on Hastings (Aquarius Press, 2017), described in detail below.

Recently I posed some questions to Thomas. Here’s what he told me.

DL: Thomas, welcome. Could you tell us a little about yourself?

TG: I was born and raised on the East Side of Detroit. My grandparents were immigrants from Italy and never spoke English fluently. My mother at five or six years old, remembered pulling into Ellis Island and got so excited, she started ringing the ship’s bell. My parents never graduated from high school, but they were serious about education. They sent my sister and me to Catholic school for twelve years. Early on in grade school, I was an avid reader and I used to make what is now considered graphic literature. My first story I ever wrote was in third grade. It was about a kid who wakes up and has a head of cabbage instead of his own head. I won some contest in school for it. However, I stole the idea from a similar story I read at the neighborhood library and then put my own spin on it. At the time, I didn’t understand plagiarizing or its crime, but I certainly was not going to say anything.

When I got to be a teen, we took the bus downtown to J.L. Hudson Department Store and I fell in love with exploring downtown. We also spent a lot of time at Belle Isle, as well. I took Creative Writing classes at Wayne State and then got involved in theater. After doing a dozen plays or so, I spent one year making a living on just acting. I joined Actor’s Equity, the Screen Actor’s Guild, and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, three unions I no longer belong to since I stopped paying dues. I studied acting at the University of Detroit and with famed actress/acting teacher/author, Uta Hagan, both here in Detroit and at her old HB Studios in New York City.

DL: Tell us about your latest book and works in progress. Where did the ideas for those come from?

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TG: My debut novel, When the Swan Sings on Hastings, is under the genre of historical fiction. It’s about a group of black and some white businessmen, numbers runners, hustlers, and Hastings regulars who face the destruction of their beloved neighborhood to make way for I-75 in an age of segregation. The neighborhood was razed from Gratiot all the way beyond Warren Ave.

The novel has a very interesting upbringing. It started as a bunch of dramatic monologues and then morphed into a one-act play that I wrote and directed for my drama class. It was performed at Detroit Northern High School where I taught. A year before I wrote the play, I was teaching drama at a DPS middle school. We put on a show every year for Black History Month that would include my drama class, the vocal music class, and the school band. The vocal music teacher, Ms. Rosalind Stearns-Brown, is also the daughter of Turkey Stearns, the Hall of Fame outfielder who played for the Detroit Stars of the Negro Leagues. His plaque is on the wall outside Comerica Park. (Ms. Stearns-Brown also sings the National Anthem every year for the Negro League series game at Comerica. Recently, she sang it at Keyworth Stadium in Hamtramck where the Stars once played.)

For Black History Month one year, she wanted to do “something about my dad” for our annual presentation. I wrote some monologues of three Negro League ballplayers, Stearns, Cool Papa Bell, and Jimmie Crutchfield as older men reminiscing about the old days.

Segue to a year later, and I rewrote the monologues into a one-act play that takes place on Hastings Street in Detroit’s historical Paradise Valley. I did research on the Negro League players and on Paradise Valley for the play.

This mash-up of Negro Leaguers and Hastings Street came about from my befriending blues musicians who played on Hastings. I bartended in Greektown in the ‘90s, and when I got off work I would go down to the now defunct Music Menu Bar on Monroe to listen to music. They had some great bands playing there. Through the great Detroit drummer, R.J. Spangler, I met Johnnie Basset, the famed blues guitarist who played on Hastings. I also met the extraordinary blues vocalist, Alberta Adams.

[image error]Hastings Street in Detroit, ca. 1960. Photo credit: Detroit Historical Society

When they took their breaks, I was lucky enough to corner them at the bar and they would tell me stories about Hastings Street and its lively music scene and nightclubs and after-hours joints. One thing led to another, and I decided to bring the Negro League guys into the world of Hastings Street. I also decided a novel was more accessible to an audience than a play; one can read a novel anywhere, even on the other side of the world. (Actually, I know someone who read it in South Korea.)  So I took a deep breath and said, “Well, I think I can write a novel. We will see one way or another.”

My work in progress is a series of short stories—a dozen or so that have to do with “working Detroit.” Two, however, are set in San Francisco. Three of them will be published in a few months along with stories from three other Detroit writers, Diana Wolfe-Popa, Ryan Ennis, and Michael Schwartz, in a collection.

I pull my art from my work and life experiences. The characters in my new batch of short stories are all working people—waiters, orderlies, assembly line workers, and actors trying to scruff their way through. I am also working on a screenplay of my novel, When the Swan Sings on Hastings. I am co-writing it with Heather Buchanan, producer of AUX Media. We have a short film of the same name showing at the Royal Oak Main Theatre on August 28 at 7p.m. We are going to show the film and play some blues with a little band I put together. I play a numbers runner in the film. But I am most excited about the cast. Arthur Ray and Grover McCants, two acting veterans from Detroit, star in it. Shahida Hasan, a dynamic actress/vocalist, plays the “Aretha” role and sings her heart out.

DL: Why do you write? What do you hope to accomplish with your writing?

TG: I write because it is who I am. Creating is very important to me, be it playing guitar, acting, or whatever kind of creative activity. I could take a more spiritual stance and say it is a gift from God, which I believe. It would be wasteful if I didn’t create. Ever since I was a kid, I was an avid storyteller and it is natural for me. In terms of accomplishment, I hope to give my readers a fulfilling experience that leaves an impression after they put the book down. I want to take them “there.” I want them to feel something—visually, emotionally-—I want them to touch, smell, and listen to the world I am creating for them. I want to take them to a place that I have living in my head and in my heart. I want them to get inside someone else and feel their joy, pain, or other emotion. I believe when we read, we see the world better, and not just from our own perspective.

DL:  Please talk a little about your writing process. What is your favorite part of the process? Least favorite?

TG: My writing process consists of rethinking incidents that I experienced in my life and finding the “literature” or the “story” in them. Everything in our mundane moments in life contributes to a bigger canvas or movie. I used to do a lot of writing with a glass of red wine or a pint of beer or at times a joint and sit in a corner at a bar and scribble away. Jack Kerouac called it “sketching.” I would sketch physical aspects of a room or people or conversations I overheard. I would scribble them down and then go home and within hours, maybe days or even weeks, I would take them and put them in a story with more meaning.

Then, there is the craft of the art. What can this story tell? What do I want my reader to feel? I love rewriting something I wrote months ago. I like to write and let it sit for a while and then come back to it with a clear head. A writer should not fall in love with one’s own words too much. Use only what drives the story. Pruning, cleaning up, watering, nourishing-—that is what I love. When I have nothing in the well, I stop. I play guitar and do other things, maybe act.

I can’t think of anything I don’t like about the writing process except forcing myself to write when I should be doing something else.

DL: Could you reflect a bit on what writing or being a writer has meant for you and your life?

TG: Ever since I was a kid, I was told I was a good storyteller. I never looked at it that way. I just said, “Man, lemme tell you what happened today.” After reading bios on Hemingway and Kerouac, I found how we can take our everyday moments in life and make them something bigger than that moment. There is so much to be found in our simple daily lives. The beauty of literature is that it takes these simple moments and makes them so much more important, psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually. Every second of life is holy. There is a story in everybody and that is what makes being a writer so precious, exciting and yeah, HOLY.

DL: Many thanks for joining us today. What is the link to your book’s web site so readers can learn more about it?

TG: Thank you for giving me this opportunity. Here is the link to the Amazon page for When the Swan Sings on Hastings: https://amzn.to/2LKL4Gk.

 

 

 

 

“Where do you get your ideas from?” part I

Like many authors, when I’m speaking to people about my writing, I tend to hear similar questions, whether I’m talking to a group or to individuals.

One of the questions I often get is, “How long did it take you to write this book?” That’s an interesting one, and I’m not sure exactly where it comes from. I’ve never asked anybody who posed it, “Whaddaya wanna know for?” That would seem rather surly and ungracious, especially if I haven’t answered their question.

I’m guessing most people have little idea about what goes into writing a novel, so the only form of measurement that makes sense to them is time and that’s why they ask about it.

But without a doubt, the question I get most often is, “Where do your ideas come from?”

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If I’m talking to people who either would like to write or have already started on the long road of becoming a writer, what they really want to know is, how can they go about finding ideas for their own writing. I usually give them some version of Henry James’s advice to young writers: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” That is, be open to everything . . . what you read, what you hear, what you see, and so on.

For a general reader at a library presentation or a book fair, I tend to talk about where the ideas for a specific book came from. And, because nobody wants to hear a long story while they’re standing at a table, I’ll usually abbreviate it.

The truth is, of course, as always, more complex.

I’m not good at just making things up out of whole cloth, which is what many people (including many writers) think being a writer is all about. For me, I have to start at a specific place—with a kernel of an idea, which may come from an anecdote I’ve heard from someone, or an item I read in the newspaper or online or elsewhere that aroused my interest. When I write mysteries, this usually has to do with a crime or violation of the norm.

Also, because I like my books to be busy, from there I braid together that starting point with elements of other ideas, again taken from my mental file cabinet where I store all my possibilities. (I’ve tried writing these down, but I usually lose my notes.)

Let’s look at the fourth Martin Preuss mystery, The Forgotten Child, as an example of how this works.

[image error]If you haven’t read the novel, here’s some context. (I’ll go easy on the spoilers.) The book is a departure from the first three books in that my main character, Martin Preuss, is now retired from the police department and is trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life once the thing that gave shape and meaning to his days has ended.

Thus he’s at loose ends when he’s asked to find someone who was last seen in the 1970s.

His search takes him back to the the art scene in the Cass Corridor in Detroit, and to the history of Ferndale, the inner-ring suburb of Detroit where he lives and works.

So where did all that come from?

When I finished the third book in the series, Guilt in Hiding, and started thinking about the next one, I knew I wanted to focus on more than just a crime, I wanted an event that had a critical impact on Ferndale.

My then-neighbor was president of the Ferndale Historical Society, and he told me about a huge fire that devastated a block in downtown Ferndale in 1975. He shared the Society’s archives with me, and he put me onto a book written by the former fire chief, which included a chapter on the fire.

That took care of the important civic event I was looking for, but I knew I needed to personalize it. Most of my books have family dysfunction at their centers, so I rifled through that mental file cabinet for a suitable direction.

I remembered hearing about several men of my acquaintance who, though currently married with families, had had a child with other women when they were young, and who had lost touch with those children over the years. One of these stories seemed like it would lend itself to a mystery novel that forced an investigator to go back in time to the 1970s, and would in addition be ripe for some compelling family drama.

These became the main strands of the plot of The Forgotten Child.

As I began to flesh out the missing person (or should I say, the missing person began to flesh himself out; this is the mysterious and exciting part of writing fiction), I realized he was an artist, and thus his link to the art scene in Detroit in the 1970s was a natural connection, as well as another likely source for more drama.

And the fire? My challenge was how to take this actual episode in Ferndale’s history and put it into a novel—to transform it from an episode in history to an integral part of the plot of a book.

I wouldn’t need to write an accurate history of the fire; historians and participants had already done that. But I would need to imaginatively transform an actual happening into a fictional event that would not only advance the plot of the book but would act as its center of gravity.

The poet Marianne Moore talks about poetry being “imaginary gardens with real toads,” and that’s what I found myself creating here.

I kept as many of the actual details of the fire in place as I could to give the events of the book authenticity and accuracy, while making them serve my own purposes. I kept the date of when it happened, the details of the fire itself (where it started, what damage it did, how it changed Ferndale), and the responses of local fire and police departments.

But because I was creating a work of fiction, I changed some details, some circumstances, and the outcome. I also switched the real people involved with my fictional characters. I changed some key details—specifically the cause of the real fire, which was never determined—to meet my own purposes in the book. I omitted some details to keep the story moving as quickly as possible.

I peopled the apartments in the building (as well as the entire novel) with imaginary characters. I call them “imaginary,” but they are “real toads”—people I might have known or seen at one time—living in this imaginary garden. (Don’t believe authors when we say we’ll never put you in our books; we always do.)

And finally, I set all this in a context consistent with the conventions of a mystery novel, with lots of bad actors and bad actions, most taken (again) from reality but transformed through the alchemy of fiction.

In the coming weeks (alternating with Indie Mondays), I’ll be talking about where the ideas came from for a few of the other books in the series, including the events that formed the inciting actions of the plots. I hope they’ll demonstrate my guiding principle: everything is fuel for a writer’s imagination.

 

 

Indie Monday

Today’s guest: Andrew Charles Lark

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Every other Monday, I’ll be featuring other authors on my blog—authors who produce quality work outside the boundaries and strictures of the traditional mass-produced, mass-marketed commercial publishing world and traditional bookstore shelves.

Today’s featured guest is the multitalented author, playwright, actor, and teacher Andrew Charles Lark. Andrew is a graduate of Wayne State University where he received his bachelor’s of arts degree in English. His play, Stop Up Your Ears!, a farcical account of a month in the life of Florence Foster Jenkins, won Wayne State University’s Heck-Rabi award and was produced at the Hilberry Studio Theater in Detroit. Other plays have been produced at theaters around Detroit and Hudson, New York.

Recently I posed some questions to Andrew. Here’s what he told me.

DL: Andrew, welcome. Could you tell us a little about yourself?

ACL: I’m a Metro-Detroit boy through and through. For all its troubles and woes, I love this city and its thriving arts and literary scene, and I’m delighted and revel in the true renaissance it’s experienced over the last few years. Detroit is a blue collar town but it’s a town that’s in love with culture, and that’s evident when one looks at the massive international impact we’ve had in our thriving music scene with Motown, and scores of other genres; our literary luminaries like Elmore Leonard, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Philip Levine to name a few, and although I stand in the shadow of giants, I’m proud and honored to contribute, in my own small way, to our area’s literary scene through my short stories, books, and plays.

DL: Tell us about your latest book and works in progress. Where did the ideas for those come from?

ACL: I have a children’s book coming out later this year titled, Monstergarten, and it’s my hope that it will help to allay those first day jitters that many five-year-olds go through as that first day of kindergarten approaches. I’m working with Danny Raymond, a wonderful illustrator who’s found just the right mix of fun and scary to make Monstergarten a delight for children four through seven years of age, but really, I think everybody who picks it up will love it. 

I’m also writing a short story that’s one of three stories in an upcoming dystopian anthology. Two other authors, for whom I have great admiration, are contributing as well. I’m really excited about this anthology because it addresses the end of humanity. Each author has been assigned a different take on that tragic time when humanity finally snuffs it—natural, man-made, and alien/supernatural. 

My ideas for this formed over the last year or so, and I had to do something creative to help process the depressing news I see almost daily regarding our imperiled planet and humankind’s seemingly boundless lack of empathy when it comes to the environment, the climate, and rampant species extinction. This may sound depressing, but I think it’s a topic of vital importance, but rest assured—the book doesn’t have a political agenda; it’s merely three great “what if” stories written by three very imaginative authors.

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I also continue to work on The Persistence of Whispers, the sequel to Better Boxed and Forgotten, my first novel, a supernatural-fantasy-mystery set in Detroit’s historic Indian Village. I’m also writing a full-length play titled, Viv n Vince, that brings classic Hollywood and Stonewall together.

DL: Why do you write? What do you hope to accomplish with your writing?

ACL: I’ve always been a story teller; even way back in elementary school, when we students would have to get up and share something with the class, my arm would always shoot up to go first. It was always fairly easy for me to invent scenarios and assemble them into fun and imaginative stories. My father was an artist and my mother was a poet, so I think some of that rubbed off. My brother is a musician, and my sister has mad skills in the kitchen as a professional chef, so we were always encouraged in our individual artistic endeavors.

As far as accomplishing anything with my writing, I can only hope that my stories and plays engage and entertain. Deeper themes always manage to creep into my stories, but in ways that are not overt and obvious, and that’s fine. I guess it’s like this: if you’ve ever walked out of the cinema after having seen a great film that generates great conversation between you and the person you saw the film with—that’s what I hope to accomplish. I hope to entertain and to make you think a little perhaps.

DL: Please talk a little about your writing process. What is your favorite part of the process? Least favorite?

ACL: When my writer hat is on, I strive to get, at a minimum, two single-spaced, 12 font, New Times Roman pages down on paper. I typically don’t write at home. I enjoy writing in coffee houses where there’s a slight buzz of people engaged in their individual things. I tune the white noise out and get to work, but I need to look up every now and see what’s going on.

I love those times when I’m writing and the subconscious seems to take over. As it is with Freud’s concept of the Id, Ego, and Super Ego—these reside inside and are instrumental to my process. When they’re in harmony, there’s a stasis and equilibrium, and my writing goes swimmingly, and other times there are battles and conflicts and I really struggle to get words onto the page. I also self-edit. I’ve heard that this is a bad habit that I should try to break, but I can’t help it. I’m a bit compulsive, and if, for example, there’s an error on page four, or an awkward sentence that needs work on a previous page, this will bug me and stand in my way until it’s fixed to my satisfaction.

My least favorite parts of the process are when things have run dry and I’m struggling for ideas. For example, it’s taken me way too long to finish The Persistence of Whispers, and that’s because I’m struggling with a well that needs time for the waters to replenish. Honestly, if I had it to do all over again, I would have written Better Boxed and Forgotten as a stand-alone book, but I didn’t, and I owe it to those who loved it to soldier on with book II.

DL: Could you reflect a bit on what writing or being a writer has meant for you and your life?

ACL: Again, I’ve always been a story teller. It’s the way I process stimuli. A teakettle whistles when the water starts to boil, and it’s the same with me. The ideas roil and boil inside and they need to pour out. My writing has also brought me the gift of being part of a great community of Detroit area, independent authors whose work and creativity inspire me in my own work.

Writing for the theater has been rewarding as well, in that a couple of my plays have enjoyed professional productions both in Detroit and New York. It’s an incredible experience watching a play that I wrote—something that came from my imagination—engage, other professionals in their skills with costumes, lighting, set design, directing, and acting—and watching how my plays have been interpreted by these other artists is the most fascinating aspect of all.

DL: Many thanks for joining us today. What are links to your books, website, and blog so readers can learn more about you and your work?

ACL: Thank you for the interview. It was an honor and a lot of fun. My website and blog: www.alarksperch.com.

Better Boxed and Forgotten’s Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Boxed-Forgotten-Archive-1/dp/1508873143/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1560536789&sr=1-1.

My Facebook Page is: https://www.facebook.com/andrew.lark.5.

Six Sure-Fire Ways to Kill Your Writers’ Group

I rarely take part in writers’ groups anymore. I totally get their usefulness—writers need support from peers, they need responses to their work from actual readers who won’t just say they loved it, a sharp reader can point something out that a writer might not have thought of, and so on. A good writers’ group can be beneficial, no doubt.

In large part, I don’t do it because it’s not how I work best. When I came of age as a writer, I learned to do most of my work alone. I wrote projects to order and under pressure of deadline; there wasn’t the time or the opportunity—or the expectation—to get other writers’ perspectives on what I was doing. My boss—or the client—had the final say.

In larger part, though, my avoidance of writers’ groups comes from my having run or taken part in so many of them over my careers as a writing teacher and writer. The other day, I  estimated how many writers’ groups I’ve been part of over the years. I came up with the semi-astonishing figure of roughly 1,200 groups over twenty-plus years, both inside and outside the classroom.

That’s 1,200 groups of writers, ranging in number from three to thirty, where people responded to each other’s stories, poems, novel drafts, or essays. I was either an active participant or a facilitator helping the writers themselves carry the conversations.

I was deep into collaborative writing, see. The whole being the “guide on the side” instead of the “sage on the stage” thing, to use one of the more ridiculous clichés of education that still makes me gag.

I thought a lot about the subject. I took courses in how to run writers’ groups. I attended workshops in how to do it. I even gave workshops for my colleagues and others in the benefits of writing groups and how to work with them.

In all that time, I saw how and why groups could be valuable. But I also saw what could go very wrong. In particular, I came to learn that certain behaviors will kill a writers’ group dead. If you’re a member of a writers’ group and you want to make your partners miserable, try some of these out:

[image error]1. Everybody’s a Critic.

Interpret “critique” to mean “criticize mercilessly” (instead of, say, “offer careful judgment about”), and criticize the hell out of the workshopper (the one who reads or presents a piece for discussion). Pick every single nit you can find, from structure to grammar, regardless of what stage the draft is in. Find fault, instead of reflecting your responses to the piece back to the author, who can then make decisions about how well she/he framed the writing in preparation for revising.

It also helps if you gang up on the writer with other members of the group.

2. Do As I Say, Not As I Do.

Understand that your other main job as participant (besides telling authors what they did wrong) is to tell the writers what they need to do to improve the work. Regardless of your own experience of literature and writing, don’t be shy about telling the author what to do with a particular work. The wronger the advice, the louder you should insist on it.

3.Tu Casa Es Mi Casa.

Take over the author’s writing completely. Pay no attention to an author’s intentions, but respond to a piece of writing based on how you would have written it yourself. Don’t give the author any chance to make decisions about what to do or change based on how well you got what she/he was saying. This works especially well if you’ve never written anything like what the author is sharing.

4. If You Can’t Say Something Bad, Don’t Say Anything, Part 1.

Don’t mention any of the strengths of the piece, and don’t bother telling the author what you liked or appreciated about the work, or thought the author did well. Your job is to focus on the bad parts. The good parts are already good, aren’t they? Why talk about them?

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Besides, agents and editors aren’t going to go easy on a writer, so why should you? You’re helping to toughen up the workshopper. Writing group as WWF Smackdown!

5. If You Can’t Say Something Bad, Don’t Say Anything, Part 2.

Never mind articulating any questions you have about the piece, or points of confusion you wonder about, or interesting places where you’d like to hear more details; these might be too helpful. Your criticisms are enough.

6. I Object!

When you’re the workshopper, defend your draft loudly and vociferously. Don’t bother trying to learn from your partners’ responses and get ideas for revision, but instead show them how wrong they are in their appraisals of your work. If you have to explain or defend what you said, it just shows how little your responders get you (and how much smarter you are).

If you try all these strategies in your next writers’ group, I promise your group mates will develop some very special feelings for you.

If, on the other hand, you find yourself doing any of these, you might try to back off from them and maybe—just maybe—your writers’ group will be more enjoyable, and a whole lot more useful.

Indie Monday

Today’s Guest: Patrick W. Gibson

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Beginning today, Indie Thursday becomes Indie Monday. Every other Monday, I’ll be featuring other authors on my blog—authors who produce quality work outside the boundaries and strictures of the traditional mass-produced, mass-marketed commercial publishing world and traditional bookstore shelves. On alternate Mondays, I’ll be making my own posts about the writing life.

Today’s featured guest is Patrick W. Gibson. Recently I posed some questions to Patrick. Here’s what he told me.

DL: Welcome. Could you tell us a little about yourself?

PWG: I’m a Michigan native and a Wayne State grad. In the past five years, I’ve also attended The Writers Studio and obtained a certificate in fiction writing from UCLA. My day job has taken me for extended living periods in Chicago, Toronto, and Japan. These experiences show up in my writing.

My short stories and flash fiction pieces favor a working class feel. I’ve been published by The Flexible Persona, Medusa’s Laugh Press, Wraparound South, Dark Ink Press, Fiction Attic Press, ARTIFEX, UofM Bear River Review, and the Ripples in Space podcast.

My wife and I live in Northville and she’s my biggest supporter in this writing adventure. We enjoy home and family, traveling, and have been avid SCUBA drivers. Three shark dives, without cages, and all limbs intact!

I’m also a hobbyist musician and my enthusiasm more than compensates for any shortages in singing and guitar playing ability.

I run the Northville District Library Writers Group. So, if you find yourself near the library on the fourth Wednesday of each month, around 7 pm, then join us for supportive discussion and feedback.

DL: Tell us about your latest works in progress. Where did the ideas for those come from?

PWG: I’ve completed one novel manuscript and I’m querying it right now with the goal of getting a traditional publishing contract. I’m also working on two more manuscripts. One is a sequel to the queried work, and the second is in a different genre, horror. All three are big city, working class tales, grown from short stories, and born from my studies at UCLA and The Writers Studio.

Besides the big projects, UofM Bear River Review recently published my flash story about an elderly couple and their love for each other and an old Buick. It’s a vision of love transitioning the physical challenges of age and dementia. I was drawn to the age and memory loss aspects from my own father’s battle. The story’s twist is fictional.

Artifex literary magazine published a creative non-fiction piece about my mother-in-law’s journey from Nazi Germany to the United States via Canada. It’s a little story set within a big story setting and deals with becoming a US citizen on the very day President Kennedy was assassinated.

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And Ripples in Space produced my sci-fi story “Apprehension Soars” as a podcast complete with music and sound effects! I could describe the story, but it’s more fun to listen to it here.

The ideas for my work often come from family and family challenges. For example, The Flexible Persona literary magazine published my creative non-fiction piece, “Birthday with Dad.” I spent one birthday with my father, and my recollection, told through a blend of baseball love and a musty estate auction, outlines a childhood. You can read it here.

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Other ideas for my work are all fiction. For example, the journal Wraparound South called for story submissions featuring contemporary Southern literature that “disrupts the expected.” My piece featured reflection and upheaval in an urban Southern family. Read it here.

And please check out my back-porch advice on writing here, also in Wraparound South.

DL: Why do you write? What do you hope to accomplish with your writing?

PWG: I write because I enjoy creating characters, putting them into situations, and seeing how they react to the quandary at hand. I’m especially drawn to flash fiction, which challenges me to develop a character, tell a complete story including emotion and a twisted ending, all in the fewest words.

I hope to craft compelling stories that captivate readers and leave them thinking about their own situations. My work may be serious, comical, even educational, but at the core is characterization. I might apply themes others might choose not to write about and situations we may not want to deal with, think dementia, family alcoholism, absent parents, and divorce. But most of us have witnessed it, perhaps experienced it. I know my characters have.

DL: Please talk a little about your writing process. What is your favorite part of the process? Least favorite?

PWG: I love doing the research and reading everything I can, in whatever genre I’m working in. I don’t think you can write well unless you read, reflect, and learn from others.

During the early stages of a big project, I like to write scenes from the beginning, middle, and end simultaneously. I do this because the plot is still malleable, the character development immature, and I’m really not sure where I’m going with things. But once I have a few dots, connection and refinement can occur.

I’ve grown to enjoy the editing process. Self-editing is one necessary discipline but working with a professional editor is very different. Your manuscript, the one you’ve worked so hard on and for so long, now becomes a team effort. It’s no longer just about you! Trust and a solid working relationship are crucial, for both parties. Similar comments apply to critique groups and beta readers.

I’m heavily involved in the query process, and it’s new to me, so I can’t say querying and publishing are my favorites, but I think any trepidation is due to their newness. Long term I expect I’ll grow to enjoy them like the other aspects in this fascinating business.

DL: Could you reflect a bit on what writing or being a writer has meant for you and your life?

PWG: Writing and success with my published short stories has enabled me to step back from the day job that used to be all-consuming from a professional standpoint.

Being a writer has also allowed artistic growth beyond words on paper. One of my characters strives to be an actor, and I took a few acting classes so I could write about the fear of going on stage. I did that, but I also learned how difficult it was to give a ten-minute monologue, memorized, and delivered with honesty and realism.

I’ve worked with local musicians, notably Bill Boley and Jill Jack, to learn vocal, instrument, and songwriting skills. Bill runs a weekly rock/folk class in Plymouth that has built my confidence in front of groups. Nothing says performance like being called on to sing “Don’t Stop Believing” in your best falsetto, while strumming a guitar. And Jill’s Big Dream studio in Ferndale is a multi-disciplined inspirational space. It’s amazing to see your poem transformed via chords, melody and voice into a three-dimensional entity.

All these actions have expanded my writing abilities and enriched my life.

DL: What are links to your books, website, and blog so readers can learn more about you and your work?

PWG: My website is the place to find links to my published work, follow my blog entries, and join me on my writing and creative journey: https://patrickwgibson.com.

Follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/pwgibsonauthor.

My Facebook page is: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009860826706.

 

Brutal Reviews of Classic Books

As part of my efforts at getting my name out in the world, I’ve often asked (begged? cajoled? pleaded with?) my readers to write reviews of my books after they’ve read them. Most of us have done that at one time or another, right?

While generally things work out for the best, occasionally we do get a review that shows a reader was, shall we say, singularly unimpressed with our creative initiatives. The blogs are filled with advice on how to deal with bad reviews . . . some say don’t read them, some say read but disregard them, some say imagine the reviewers in their underwear, and so. My own way of dealing with the problem is to remind myself that even the best got lousy reviews, and it didn’t stop them.

Here’s a selective listing (culled from the Internet) of twenty scathing reviews of books that are now considered classics of literature. Most reviews were published contemporaneously with the books they review. They range from the snarky to the morally outraged, and they’re a good reminder that not every book is to every reader’s taste . . . and reviewers, like everybody else, are sometimes not very good at what they do.

Enjoy, have a laugh—and then get back to work!

 

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“Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.” —The London Critic, 1855, on Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

“It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.” — Thomas Wentworth Higginson

 

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“The final blow-up of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent. . . . This is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.” —The New Yorker on Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

 

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“It was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the overworked field of sex fiction.” —Chicago Times Herald, 1899, on The Awakening by Kate Chopin

 

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“Miss Willa S. Cather in O Pioneers (O title!!) is neither a skilled storyteller nor the least bit of an artist.” —Dress and Vanity Fair Magazine

 

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“The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.” —L.P Hartley, The Saturday Review, 1925, on The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

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“Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.” —James Lorimer, North British Review, 1847, on Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

 

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“That a book like this could be written—published here—sold, presumably over the counters, leaves one questioning the ethical and moral standards…there is a place for the exploration of abnormalities that does not lie in the public domain. Any librarian surely will question this for anything but the closed shelves. Any bookseller should be very sure that he knows in advance that he is selling very literate pornography.”  —Kirkus Reviews, 1958, on Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

“There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.” —New York Times on Lolita

 

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“A gloomy tale. The author tries to lighten it with humor, but unfortunately her idea of humor is almost exclusively variations on the pratfall. . . .Neither satire nor humor is achieved.” ⎯Saturday Review of Literature, 1952, on Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

 

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“Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer.” —Le Figaro, 1857, on Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

 

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“Never have I read such tosh. As for the first two chapters, we will let them pass, but the third, the fourth the fifth the sixth – merely the scratchings of pimples on the body of the boot-boy at Claridges.” —Virginia Woolf on Ulysses by James Joyce

“The average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it … save bewilderment and a sense of disgust.” —New York Times on Ulysses

“[Ulysses] appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine… I have no stomach for Ulysses.“—The Sporting Times, 1922

 

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“This is easily one of the worst books I’ve ever read. And bear in mind that I’ve read John Grisham.” —Susan Cohen on Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With That Dragon Tattoo in the Charleston City Paper

 

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“I have two recommenda­tions. First, don’t buy this book. Second, if you buy this book, don’t drop it on your foot.” —The New Yorker on Chesapeake by James Michener

 

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“Occasional overwriting, stretches of fuzzy thinking, and a tendency to waver, confusingly, between realism and surrealism.” —Atlantic Monthly on Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

 

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“[Kerouac] can slip from magniloquent hysteria into sentimental bathos, and at his worst he merely slobbers words.” —Chicago Tribune on On the Road by Jack Kerouac

“That’s not writing. That’s typing.” —Truman Capote on On the Road

 

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“Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and  hit her over the skull with her own shinbone!” —Mark Twain on Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

 

Indie Thursday

Today’s guest: Emma Palova

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Every Thursday, I’ll be featuring other indie authors on my blog—authors who produce quality work outside the boundaries and strictures of the traditional mass-produced, mass-marketed commercial publishing world and traditional bookstore shelves.

Today’s featured guest is Emma Palova. Emma is the author of two books: a new book, Secrets, in the Shifting Sands Short Stories series, which will be released on July 1, 2019, and the first book in the series, Shifting Sands Short Stories, published in 2017.

Recently I posed some questions to Emma. Here’s what she told me.

DL: Could you tell us a little about yourself?

EP: I was born in former communist Czechoslovakia and I studied civil engineering, which I hated. I had no choice, that was our punishment for leaving the country illegally. We immigrated to the USA for the first time in 1969 in the aftermath of the Prague Spring, a political movement for socialism with a human face.

We returned back to Czechoslovakia in 1973 for President Husak’s amnesty. My dad, Professor Vaclav Konecny, decided to leave the country illegally again so he could teach math in the States. It took my mom Ella four long years to join dad. I married in the meantime. We left the country for the USA the second time in 1989 with my children. I was naturalized in 1999.

Politics have formed my life, from a civil engineer to a reporter for local newspapers in West Michigan. The trek was long and painful, marked by mistakes and victories. I was constantly without money chasing after stories, even though I gathered some awards along the way. I quit journalism for good in 2012 to pursue my author’s dreams during the rise of the Internet with new opportunities.

My only regret is that we returned to the old country in 1973. Otherwise, I am deeply humbed by all the opportunities this country has given to me.

DL: Tell us about your latest book and works in progress. Where did the ideas for those works come from?

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EP: My newest book is called Secrets. It is part of the Shifting Sands Short Stories series. It is a collection of fifteen short stories; two of them are historical fiction, while some stories deal with aging. Many of my short stories are based in my journalistic experience. Some of the real-life stories we could never publish because we had no corroboration from the witnesses. Today, the newscasts say whatever without any attribution. We have no way of verifying the truth behind the news. That wasn’t always the case. Plus, if you live in a small town, you have to live by hometown rules. We all know each other. We know who lives where, and who slept with whom. We know it, but we don’t write about it. These are all workable ideas for me: things unsaid, stories untold and people hurting. I like to combine fiction with realism. It’s called magic realism spiked with surrealism.

DL: Why do you write? What do you hope to accomplish with your writing?

[image error]EP: I write because I don’t want people to be bored. That’s my tagline: “You deserve to be entertained.” I don’t want us to just be watching politicians arguing. I think we all deserve a little break from the mundane and the ordinary.

I want to accomplish making my historical fiction story, “Silk Nora,” into a movie. I have written a screenplay registered with Writer’s Guild of America, West. I want to write “Silk Nora” as a screenplay, as well.

Just like any other writer, I also want to express myself in a manner that makes other people think long after they’ve read the stories. That is my sincere hope and desire. I also like to write timeless stuff for any generation. If it transforms someone, that is even more important.

DL: Please talk a little about your writing process. What is your favorite part of the process? Least favorite?

EP: The writing process itself is a lot of small elements that have to fuse together like atoms in a nuclear reaction. Sometimes, I wake up in the morning and I have no idea what I am going to write about. Then, comes a small thing like meditation or studying Spanish that fuses it together, or staring into the water at a lake or at sea.

My favorite part is that I don’t know where the writing process is going to lead me or how is going to surprise me with new discoveries.

My least favorite part is the drudgery of it. By that I mean pushing yourself beyond your limits every day. There are times when I envy people like highway workers or the guys in lime green vests who turn the stop sign into go or proceed with caution. I like cashiers at the stores, too. I know they have their worries and troubles. I worked at a Midwest grocery chain store for four years. It inspired stories in my first book like “Orange Nights.” Each experience enriches a writer, and we have to take it to a higher level. Plus our highest mission is to entertain and rescue people from everyday misery.

DL: Could you reflect a bit on what writing or being a writer has meant for you and your life?

EP: Being a writer has transformed me from a naïve person into a person with deeper insights into the lives of other people. Writing has changed my life in different stages like a butterfly. It’s basically something I cannot stop doing, even if sometimes I want to. As any writer can attest, writing is not about money or the quest for it. It’s a calling. If money comes, it’s a bonus, a friend once told me. I would like to talk about the book covers. I designed both covers based on my love for photography. The credit for the cover of Secrets goes fully to the Belrockton Museum. I found the picture of “The Face of Gossip” in the girls’ dormitories. Pictures and art also inspire me, but in a different way, more toward movies.

DL: What are links to your books, website, and blog so readers can learn more about you and your work?

EP: My blog is EW (Emma’s Writings) at http://emmapalova.com.

My Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/emmapalovaauthor/.

My Twitter page is Emma Palova (@EmmaPalova) | Twitter.

Here are the links to my books in all formats:

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The First Two Chapters of Cold Dark Lies

This week’s blog post is a teaser: the first two chapters of the latest Martin Preuss mystery, Cold Dark Lies.

The ideas for the book go back a long way. As in all the novels, the final version braids together several strands that come from “real” life. The main plot thread comes from an article I read in a Detroit newspaper many years ago about an auto executive from Bloomfield Hills who was found dead in one of the no-tell motels in Ferndale. It was a minor blip in the news day, but it stuck with me all this time. I was intrigued by the dissonance between his privileged, upper-middle class existence and his desire (or need) to take a walk on the wild side at the skeevy motel, with tragic results for himself and the family he must have left behind.

The idea for one of the subplots in the book comes from a student who came to talk to me once about a research study she was undertaking to find out if she was really related to a criminal gang in Detroit in the 1920s, as family lore had insisted.

As always, by the time both of these threads made it to the final version, I had changed much—characters, situations, names, details, circumstances, motivations, and so on. Then I set it all in an imaginary context consistent with a mystery story—so I made up lots of bad actors, bad actions, and events that didn’t happen . . . but that could have. 

At first, I imagined the motel guy as a character in a poem called “The Secret Life,” but I knew there was more to the story than the poem could explore. When I started thinking about the next book in the series after An Uncertain Accomplice, I took the story out of my back pocket where I had kept it all these years and started thinking about using it in a Preuss mystery.

This is pretty typical of how I’ve been working with these books. Only in the first book, Crimes of Love, did I make up the inciting episode; in all the rest, I started out with a situation I knew about either because somebody told me the story or I read about it somewhere. (Henry James’s advice to writers: “Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.”) After that, it was a matter of imaginatively transforming the original real inciting situations to make them fit with my own purposes and the demands of the plots.

So here’s the beginning of how that process turned out in Cold Dark Lies. Enjoy!

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1

Thursday, September 13, 2012

The hammering brought him back. Loud, insistent pounding on the door. And raised voices outside. And the door handle jiggling. Then more pounding.

He opened his eyes in darkness and rolled his head over the rug where he was sprawled. The smell was unpleasant: damp, sour, musty.

From where he lay, limbs outstretched, his eyes focused on the stumpy and scuffed legs of the bed, the tangle of clothes on the floor, the peeling caramel feet and brown cracked leather of the arm chair, turned on its side. The thick wall of the dresser.

The effort exhausted him. He closed his eyes. He was so tired. Why couldn’t he just sink back into that void where he floated before the pounding on the door roused him?

The banging stopped. The voices receded.

Silence outside.

He listened. Silence in the room, too.

Was he alone?

He lifted his head. Intense pain shot through his neck and temple. As through every other part of his body, he now realized.

He didn’t hurt before—he didn’t feel much of anything—but now he was conscious of sharp aches in his head, ribs, face . . .

He licked his lips and tasted the thick, sweet tang of blood.

He raised his right arm and saw the sleeve of his white shirt rolled up to the elbow. The golden red hair that had furred his forearm ever since he turned fourteen. Around his wrist, the sleek black Fitbit, and, on the third finger of his hand, the ring his ex-wife had given him when he graduated Michigan State—the head of a Spartan warrior carved in intaglio carnelian in a gold setting, like a temple.

And flopping lazily from the crook of his elbow, a syringe still stuck into a vein, pulling at the skin.

Oozing a dribble of blood down to the threadbare, colorless weave of the carpet.

How did that get there?

He couldn’t remember how.

Or why.

Or when.

He wanted to make sense of his situation, but thinking was too hard. His mind was too foggy.

He lowered his arm. In the silence of the room, blackness began to close back in on him, slowly, like a cloth fluttering down over his face.

He was relieved when his thoughts, too, began to close down. No more thinking. Not about what he was doing here, or anything else.

He closed his eyes. Gradually his pain eased, and he welcomed the release. There was only silence.

And finally there was nothing.

 

2

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

“He was a bad one,” the woman said, and gave her head a sad shake, as though the memory itself hurt.

Martin Preuss waited for her to go on, but she said nothing more. She seemed lost in thought, gazing at the blank wall behind him. He sat with her in what she called the parlor, the front room in her large home in the Boston-Edison Historic District of Detroit. The place smelled of cat pee and old wood, the sweetish-sour odor that reminded Preuss of his childhood home.

All that was missing was the sound of his father raging upstairs while the rest of the family tiptoed around downstairs so they wouldn’t disturb “Daddy’s work.”

Unlike his family’s minimalist home, this one resembled a comfortable museum, with heavy wooden settees and huge armchairs from another age and lush Oriental rugs on the hardwood floors. In the other room, Preuss had noticed a massive Steinway grand piano when the woman, Sarah Posner, invited him in.

She lived here alone with her three cats, so their conversation was interrupted only by her memories. She had lived in this house for decades with her late husband and their three children, who were now grown and scattered across the country.

“You did know him, then,” Preuss prompted, to bring her back from her remembrance.

“Oh, yes,” she said. Her eyes returned from the past to land back on him with a bright intensity. She was small and hunched in the wingback chair where she sat. Her skin was the color and texture of old parchment, and the knuckles of her hands were swollen and stiff as she gripped the arms of her chair. Wisps of white hair peeked from the turban she wore.

“We all knew about him,” she continued. “Izzie was already in prison by the time my Morrie and I were married. But Morrie know him when he was little. Izzie was Morrie’s great-uncle, you see. I didn’t meet Izzie until he got out of prison. He was an old man by then. Old and defeated. And, you know, Morrie’s family used to talk about them. Izzie and his cousin Leon both. Morrie knew Leon, too, but Leon was killed in the thirties, so I never met him.”

She thought for a few moments longer, then said, “They were all bad boys.”

She drew her mouth together in a pinched frown of disapproval.

“They reflected so badly on us,” she said. “It’s one thing to say, all right, they were immigrants, they had to make a place for themselves, it was a bad time, they had no other skills. But it’s another to look at what they did and how they did it. So cruel. And to know people would look at them and think they represented us all. People in this city already had enough reasons to hate us, between the poison they heard from Henry Ford and Father Coughlin.”

She fell into silence as she reflected on her family.

Preuss sketched a fast diagram of the connections in his notebook. When he got back to his office, he would have to draw out a more detailed chart of the family relationships.

“You’ve never met my client?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Until you called, I’d never heard of her. But now I think I’d quite like to meet her.”

“I’m sure she’d like to meet you, too.”

“Maybe you could set something up,” Sarah said. “She could come for tea.”

“You can probably fill in a lot of family history for her. She seems hungry for it.”

The woman nodded absently, and he wondered if she was off on another reverie.

He had asked her about her family’s connections with members of the Purple Gang, the group of Jewish criminals around Detroit in the 1920s. They began as shakedown artists and petty thieves and wound up controlling the local bootleg liquor trade from Canada during Prohibition, subsequently hiring themselves out as hitmen and enforcers.

Preuss’s client was a college student named Beverly Frankel. She hired Greene and Preuss, Investigations, to track down a rumor in her family that they were related to a few of the Purples. His search led him to this 95-year-old woman and the genteel poverty of her mansion.

According to Sarah Posner, the Frankel family’s stories about their links to the gang were true.

But the family connections were to two cousins who were among the most savage of the crew, so Preuss didn’t know how his client would react to the news. She struck him as someone looking more for colorful, romantic stories of outlaws to tell her friends, but Isadore Adler and Leon Glick’s bombings, assassinations, and brutal enforcement methods weren’t the stuff of romance.

Like many cases he had worked since joining Emmanuel Greene’s detective firm after retiring from the Ferndale Police Department’s Detective Bureau, the lesson here was, don’t ask questions you might not want answered.

Before he could ask the woman any more about her relations, he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Do you have to get that?”

“Let me just check,” he said. “It might be about my son.”

He glanced at the screen. It wasn’t about Toby; the call was from Rhonda Citron, the administrative manager of the detective agency.

“Excuse me,” he said, “it’s my office. I should take this.”

She raised a wan hand in permission and took another sip of her tea. She stared into the air, as though she could see images floating there of the past they had been talking about.

He stood and walked to the parlor’s bay window looking out on the broad, manicured lawns of Edison Boulevard. He connected the call. “Rhonda,” he said.

“Are you still at your appointment in Detroit?”

“I am.”

“For much longer?”

“I think we’re almost done. What’s up?”

“Manny has a one o’clock meeting with a new client and he just called,” Rhonda said. “He’s going to be late. He wanted to know if you could take it for him. He said he doesn’t want the client sitting around waiting.”

He held the phone away from his ear to check the time. Twelve-thirty.

“I can just make it,” he said. “You might have to stall the appointment a little.”

“Great. I’ll let Manny know. Things okay there?”

“I found the link I was looking for. I just need to nail down the next steps. I’ll wrap things up and see you soon.”

He disconnected and returned to the parlor. “Unfortunately, I’m going to have to get back,” he said. “Mrs. Posner, could we talk again?”

“Anytime,” she said. “I don’t know how much more I can tell you, but . . . next time, why don’t you bring Miss—what was her name?”

“Frankel.”

“Bring her when you come. I’d like to meet her.”

“Excellent,” said Preuss. “I’ll set it up.”

Sarah Posner said she would look forward to it.

 

[Interested in reading more? Find Cold Dark Lies at Amazon.com or order it through your local bookstore or directly from me at donaldlevin.com.]