Debra H. Goldstein's Blog, page 36

Final Beginnings – How I Met Your Mother and My Life

Author Debra H. Goldstein

Final Beginnings – How I Met Your Mother and My Life

by Debra H. Goldstein

Last night, in the final minute of its eighth season, How I Met Your Mother’s audience met the mother. Ted, the main character, didn’t meet her, but in that moment, we knew that the stage was set for an entirely new ninth season for all of the characters — a season of exploration, change, happenstance, dismay and growth. In fact, the showrunners have said that when the show goes into syndication, one will always be able to immediately distinguish season one to eight reruns from ninth season episodes.

As a child of the television era (Little Ricky was born a few months before me), I often associate historical events or moments in my life with things I saw on television. I remember being ten and seeing the replay of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on television in my classroom and then going to chair a club meeting of a club that never met again because our associated memories of that day were too sad; I recall being involved in the writing and production of my first play in a children’s theater group when we stopped rehearsing long enough to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon; I understood how ravaging AIDS was going to be when I saw the physical contrast in the Rock Hudson who appeared in his last television appearance with Doris Day from the finely chiseled features that caught my eye in McMillan and Wife and reruns of one of my all time favorite movies, Giant.

Ted and his HIMYM friends are all entering new phases in their lives, as am I. Effective June 1, 2013, I will step down from the bench after twenty-three years. I will be wrapping up a legal career that has spanned more than thirty-five years. When I announced six months ago the date I would no longer schedule hearings so I could bring proper closure to my time on the bench, my colleagues were in shock. One doesn’t give up a lifetime position at my age. They pointed out that our last judges to retire were 88, 86 and 79. I countered with two facts – that because I was appointed when I was more than twenty years under the average age, I already have served more time on the bench than all but one of them and that if I am lucky, I can have a second career that rivals the longevity of my first.

In some ways, my legal career can be compared to the twists and turns of experiences I initially viewed on television. Music evolved for me from when I was first permitted by my parents to watch Dick Clark’s American Bandstand to when The Beatles made their American appearance on Ed Sullivan. My love for tight comical writing and timing can be traced to the impact shows featuring Johnny Carson, Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore, Saturday Night Live and most recently the casts of The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother have had on me. The remembrance of current events through stand-alone scripts or as worked into period pieces like MadMen have made me think of times and events I long thought forgotten.

I have been lucky as a lawyer to have experienced many firsts – coming through school at a time when there were few women, opting to practice international tax law and then labor law when those were not areas women went into (the interviews for those jobs are the stuff for another blog), being the first woman in the Birmingham, Alabama Office of the Solicitor for the Department of Labor, trying an equal pay case of first impression, Marshall vs. Georgia Southwestern, when I was twenty-five, receiving a merit appointment as a federal Administrative Law Judge when I was thirty-six and being sworn in at thirty-seven when the average age was fifty-eight (that was the year, when through the merit appointment system the presence of women in the 1400+ federal Administrative Law Judges was doubled from the thirteen originally grandmothered in when their jobs were elevated to the ALJ level). On a personal note, I am lucky to have grown up in a home that fell somewhere between Leave it to Beaver, Modern Family, The Middle, Family, Dick Van Dyke, The Cosby Show and The Jetsons. After almost thirty years as a wife, step-mother, mother of twins and associated community volunteer, Girl Scout leader, PTA and soccer mom, I leave it to my family to decide which TV shows each felt they lived in with me.

Like Ted, the coming season of my life will introduce me to new people and challenges. My goal is to give myself the opportunity to return to my first love fulltime. Whether a blog, the new book I just finished and am now shopping, short stories or essays, I am permitting myself to take the professional plunge as a writer. Spending time with friends and family, exercising, and doing a few crazy things like taking a quilting class also are on my bucket list. We know from the prologue of HIMYM shows, that Ted meets the right woman, falls in love, marries, and has two children – the success he dreamed of from the pilot episode. I don’t know if my show will have the same happy ending, but tune in and we’ll watch it together.

 

Guest Blogger – Victoria Weisfeld – Follow that Thread!

 

Victoria Weisfeld
Author

Follow That Thread!  

by Victoria Weisfeld

“Out the back door and under the big ash was a picnic table . . . I lay down on it for nearly two weeks, staring up into branches and leaves, fighting fear and panic, because I had no idea how to begin a piece of writing.” These first words from John McPhee’s essay on narrative structure, published in the January 14, 2013, issue of The New Yorker resonate with every writer who’s faced the bleak whiteness of a blank computer screen.

McPhee’s piece is about writing narrative non-fiction. Long-form non-fiction—the sort we see in high-quality magazines—bears striking similarities to fiction itself. It tells a story, it has a satisfying arc, it nails interesting characters, there’s theme and incident and power in the telling. John McPhee is a master of the form. His Coming into the Country was part of my preparation for writing a short story set in Alaska. And his long essays on places and people and happenings in New Jersey, where I live, add a richness to my home ground.

Almost as if he expects us fiction-writers to follow behind him, listening to his exploration of structure with our differently tuned ears, he says, “A compelling structure in nonfiction can have an attracting effect analogous to a story line in fiction.”

Where does your story line, your narrative thread, begin? It might not begin as far back as David Copperfield’s opening chapter, “I Am Born,” but its rightful beginning might be as the story’s forces are gathering and rumbling like distant thunderheads.

Or does it begin with the illuminating stroke that is the story’s precipitating event? I often start writing in the moment when the precipitating action is under way, a spot my writing coach calls “pot already boiling.” This is different from what I like to read. I enjoy easing into the action with “it was the best of times; it was the worst of times” like Dickens sets the stage for A Tale of Two Cities, which he follows up with an tremendously out-of-fashion discourse on roadway hazards encountered by the Dover mail. But, in writing, I plunge in. My first suspense novel opens with the heroine trying to escape from a stranger who she thinks is pursuing her and means to hurt her. He is, and he does. The one I’m working on now starts with the hero at a testimonial dinner, biding his time until he can slip away to visit his mistress. In paragraph two, he arrives at her apartment and finds her sprawled on a maroon velvet sofa, dead from a gunshot wound. Pot already boiling.

Or does it start at the very end so that the whole work is an extended reminiscence? This approach is perfectly captured by the title Elizabeth George uses for her harrowing novel about impoverished London immigrants: What Came Before He Shot Her. Right in the title, she gives you the punch line.

With respect to the essay that led McPhee to stare at the leaves, he says, “I had never tried to put so many different components—characters, descriptions, dialogue, narrative, set pieces, humor, history, science, and so forth—into a single package.” When we sit down to write or plan our next novel, we are in much the same position. We have the germ of an idea, possible plot points, a couple of characters who may be new or familiar, some loosely thought-out scenes. How do we assemble them? If we’re mystery writers, we also will eventually have to work in clues, red herrings, suspects, and more than a dram of well researched plausibility. We have enough “components,” as McPhee called them, to drive us crazy.

The easiest and most-often-chosen path for a story is strict chronology with a little backstory artfully thrown in to answer the question “what just happened?” Mysteries offer perfect opportunities for marshalling the evidence of the past: “At last Aunt Janet’s long-ago remark began to make sense . . .” Now there is context for Aunt Janet’s prescient observation. Dropping in backstory bits are little backward loops in our narrative thread that don’t divert it from its essential forward motion.

Sometime, though, we want a different, we hope more effective structure to highlight our themes, or even to create the more intense drama. McPhee describes a number of alternative paths. A key initial scene might be followed by a long flashback to the beginning that makes its way back to the first scene—“now I understand!”—passes it, and continues on to the end. An initial scene may be followed by a giant leap forward in time, and the unraveling of those future events finally illuminate the beginning.

More complex looping structures reinforce and build the resonance of the writer’s theme over time. This last approach might be adapted to the story of a woman who keeps meeting the same wrong kind of man, caught in a destructive emotional groove that keeps replaying in her life—Groundhog Day without the happy ending.

By visualizing your narrative thread as a continuous forward unreeling, despite such loops, scenes that don’t contribute become more apparent. In the structure you’re creating, you’ve lost the thread. People who write by tightly plotting their stories before they start out—essentially storyboarding them—probably find it easier to identify superfluous scenes and keep what stays in the best order. More organic writers, like me, need to examine retrospectively whether the thread of our story has frayed or become hopelessly tangled.

If starting and sequencing the elements in your writing are hard, so is making sure you end where you should. Originally, my suspense novel ended in a happy, romantic place. Moonlight, hand-holding, uncertainty. I liked it. But it wasn’t strong enough. Eventually I added a new last chapter that put my character firmly in charge of her own fate, the undisputed hero in her own story.

Adding a bit is sometimes necessary; subtracting can be just as necessary, but harder. McPhee advises, “If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that.” (Fiction writers should perhaps substitute “scene” for “page.”) He says you may find “you were finished before you thought you were.”

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Vicki Weisfeld writes mysteries and suspense and has several published short stories to her credit, including two published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. She’s currently in search of an agent for a completed suspense novel featuring an American travel writer whose assignments—and her own overactive curiosity—regularly lead her into trouble. She has a journalism degree from the University of Michigan, currently lives in Princeton, N.J., and is a member of Sisters in Crime. She works out her writing frustrations by dancing flamenco and simmers down with yoga. What she’s reading, writing, and thinking about, including news items that beg to be woven into stories, can be found on her website: http://www.vweisfeld.com.

Guest Blogger: Kaye George – Writing What I Know

 

Author Kaye George

Writing What I Know – by Kaye George

Writers are told to “write what we know,” right? This poses a problem for mystery writers because most of us haven’t killed anyone, or even been shot. My life contains so little violence, it’s practically G-rated. So mystery writers soldier on, imaging people shot, strangled, poisoned, and bludgeoned all over the place. Some of us enroll in Citizen Police Academies. I went through one in Austin, TX, and gained an enormous amount of knowledge from it.

But, as far as writing what I know, that’s how I came to create EINE KLEINE MURDER. I’ve played violin since I was 10. I’ll leave you to wonder how years that adds up to. I started piano at age 5 and still noodle away at that occasionally. I even pretend to sing. All that is to say that I have a background in music, mostly classical music. I love composing, which I started doing in high school. I didn’t get too far in taking music theory classes, though, since that wasn’t my major in college and, after freshman year, I dropped out of the Northwestern Orchestra due to time constraints. However, when I joined a string quartet in Dallas called Allegro Strings, we sometimes found ourselves wanting to play something that hadn’t been arranged for a string quartet. I seem to naturally think in four-part harmony, having played in quartets since junior high school, and also having sung in church choirs the same amount of time. I loved arranging for our quartet!

Fast forward a few years, after eons of frustrating short story submissions and rejections, to the point where I decided to take up novel writing. Since my favorite reading was mystery, I already knew the form and the conventions and I gravitated to the genre. The first mystery I wrote that isn’t forever shoved into the back of a drawer, was SONG OF DEATH. This is the novel that eventually became, after publication of several other mysteries, EINE KLEINE MURDER, and has been picked up by Barking Rain Press, much to my overflowing joy.

I have a passion for classical music and hope I can convey that to the reader. I think a lot of people are afraid of classical, but only because they don’t know much about it. But it’s like art: you know what you like. You don’t have to know sonata trio form, or what allargando means. You just have to listen, accept and reject. You’ll know what you like when you hear it.

One of my favorite symphony goers was a guy who worked with my husband a few years ago. He loved going to the symphony, but knew absolutely nothing about music. He asked me what those funny long wooden things were (bassoons), why we shouldn’t clap every time they stopped playing (because you don’t clap between movements, just at the end of the whole piece) and other questions that made me chuckle. But he loved hearing the orchestra because he lived for the moments when all the strings were playing loudly. That’s what he liked and he knew he liked it. And I liked that about him!

I’d sincerely like to know if anyone learns anything about music from reading my mystery, although learning about music isn’t required! I’d also like to know if anyone completely unfamiliar with classical music gets enjoyment from the book. After all, there are deaths–and mystery!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

Kaye George is a short story writer and novelist who has been nominated for Agatha awards twice. She is the author of four mystery series: the Imogene Duckworthy humorous Texas series, the Cressa Carraway musical mystery series, the FAT CAT cozy series, and The People of the Wind Neanderthal series. EINE KLEINE MURDER, the first Cressa Carraway novel debuts in April from Barking Rain Press. DEATH IN THE TIME OF ICE, the first Neanderthal book, will be published later this year by Untreed Reads. The first FAT CAT book, from Berkley Prime Crime, will appear in 2014.

Her short stories can be found in her collection, A PATCHWORK OF STORIES, as well as in several anthologies, various online and print magazines. She reviews for “Suspense Magazine”, writes for several newsletters and blogs, and gives workshops on short story writing and promotion. Kaye is agented by Kim Lionetti at BookEnds Literary and lives in Knoxville, TN. Homepage: http://kayegeorge.com/

Kaye George, Guppy president, two-time Agatha Nominee/

Imogene Duckworthy Mystery series/

EINE KLEINE MURDER, April 2013/

FAT CAT cozy series, writing as Janet Cantrell, coming 2014/

DEATH IN THE TIME OF ICE, coming soon from Untreed Reads/

http://kayegeorge.com/        Want my newsletter? Email me and I’ll put you on the list.

FRAGILE ANGLES by Debra H. Goldstein

Fragile Angles by Debra H. Goldstein

Recently, I had a birthday, but I didn’t have a lot of time to dwell on being a year older because my calendar was so full of “special” birthday events. Besides attaining another year of age, I’m sure I gained five pounds during the celebrations! What was important to me during what became my birthday month, were the friends and family members who wanted to share it with me. Each lunch, dinner, cupcake with a candle, was delightful, but three things put it all in perspective for me: receiving the Mildred Bell Johnson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Girl Scouts of North Central Alabama, an engagement party for my youngest daughter, and the unexpected death of a friend the day after he was part of a small, but joyful, birthday dinner party for me.

Three days before my birthday, I spoke the following words before almost four hundred people as I accepted the Mildred Bell Johnson award:

When Mildred Bell Johnson founded the first Girl Scout troop for African – American girls in Alabama and then worked diligently as a civil right activist, educator, Girl Scout district director, and assistant moderator of the United Church of Christ, she never dreamed that there would be an award named for her. She was doing what she believed was right for her community and for young women.

Today, I am humbled receiving the award named for Mildred Bell Johnson not only because of its namesake, but because of my admiration for the women who have received this award before me. They are a class of women whom I deeply respect for their integrity and their willingness to often forsake recognition while bringing others together to make a difference – or as Girl Scouts say – to leave a place better than we found it.

As a brownie, Girl Scout, and leader, I was taught and taught others to believe that we have a responsibility to be involved in any way we can contribute. I also learned that none of us do it alone – no matter how hard we work.

To digress for a moment, when my son, Stephen, was just beginning to learn how to print, he did something wrong and apologized by leaving a note on my pillow that he signed your little angle as he couldn’t spell angel.

I am honored and grateful today to accept this award, but it really is a reflection of the accomplishments and efforts for our community and its members by most of you in this room.

I thank the Girl Scouts of North-Central Alabama for singling me out today; I thank my friends who listen and help me connect the dots whenever I get a hairbrained idea, and I thank my family – especially my husband, Joel, who for thirty years has supported me in anything I try to do and our four wonderful children, three of whom are here today. They, and all of you, are the angles that combine to make me whole. Thank you again.

At that moment, I was a little worried that receiving a lifetime achievement award at this age was premature, but I was excited to be joining a class of women I deeply respect. It was a perfect day.

A few days after my birthday, five couples got together for a “special” birthday dinner. We laughed as we shared good food, friendship, and an evening where work and pressures were forgotten as we enjoyed each other’s company. It was a weekday work night, but we ignored that fact and stayed longer than any of us meant to. As we compared notes the next day, everyone who had been there agreed, it was a time good memories were made.

We flew to Houston two days after the dinner to attend a shower for my daughter and her future husband given by friends of his parents. When we landed in Houston and I turned on my phone, I saw I had voicemails, texts, and e-mails asking me to immediately call two people. We all know that when messages say urgent, but don’t say why, it isn’t good. It wasn’t. One of our dear friends who had been at the birthday dinner had had a stroke and died. He hadn’t been ill. He wasn’t old. My husband and I stood in the airport shocked remembering humorous exchanges with him during the birthday dinner, plans he had made to go to a basketball game next season with my husband, and realizing that in a matter of hours the love of his life was now a widow. We walked to the car waiting for us in disbelief. As my husband made small talk with the father of my daughter’s fiancé, I called our friend’s wife and other friends and shared a moment of shock, sorrow, and “what can we do to help” with them. Then, my husband and I had to put on our game faces to enjoy the weekend with our daughter.

I have blogged before about my reaction to my daughter being in love (My Daughter is in Love – 9/23/12) and once again, I felt excitement and joy seeing how happy she is. Her happiness brought me flashbacks of when I fell in love and got engaged. As the weekend progressed, I couldn’t help but think about our friends who also had a perfect love that now had ended as I watched this young couple just beginning their lives together. Aloud, I wished them joy and happiness, but in my heart I prayed for them. It was a prayer that comes from knowing how important the angles are that make us whole and how fragile keeping them together is.

Guest Blogger: Polly Iyer – Good Books Find Readers – Despite Breaking The Rules

Author Polly Iyer and her books

Good Books Find Readers – Despite Breaking The Rules by Polly Iyer

Certain things make me grumpy. One is when I finish reading a book then pick up another in the same genre that sounds almost exact. The plot is different, marginally, but in many ways, you know what’s going to happen because there’s a recipe writers follow for that particular genre. I’m sure it’s based on the successes of many bestsellers, but after a while they all start to sound repetitive, at least to me. Is this the result of the demand of those who control what we read, namely agents, editors, and publishers?

Some genres have to adhere to the rules or they become something else. Romance, for instance, has to have a Happy-Ever-After ending because without it, the genre ceases to be a romance, by definition. Even a possibly-together-ever-after ending doesn’t cut it. Readers of that genre expect the Hero/heroine to ride off into the sunset and be together forever. Wedding bells are a bonus. Romantic suspense, which I usually write―all my books have a romance, kind of―is a little trickier, but nevertheless must adhere to the HEA ending. I was speaking to a multi-published romance author recently and mentioned I had just watched the movie, Casablanca, and declared it a romance. “No, no,” she said. It’s a love story but not a romance. She was right. There is no happy-ever-after in Casablanca. But I still think it’s one of the most romantic movies I’ve ever seen.

Then add Conflict to the formula. This is a must and where I have a problem. The writer must find a way to keep the H/h apart or in conflict. I don’t like when the conflict goes on too long, because it becomes forced and contrived. Gone with the Wind is neither a romance nor a love story. So what is it? I honestly don’t know, but Margaret Mitchell sure knew conflict, and readers ate up GWTW when it was written almost 75 years ago. They’re still buying and loving that classic because of the push/pull of the hero and heroine. Conflict.

There are two ways to write conflict in a romance or romantic-suspense: the H/h have an instant dislike to each other for whatever reason, or the story provides the conflict. The latter might put the H/h on opposite sides, but the story is creating the discord. In my not-quite- romantic-suspense book, Hooked, my heroine, an ex-call girl, is coerced by the handsome cop to work undercover at a brothel to find a murderer or go to prison for all the money she stashed in an overseas account and never paid taxes on. (I love characters who cross ethical lines.) She gave up the life, and now the cops are forcing her back into it. Needless to say, she’s not happy. The cop, on the other hand, feels guilty. To make matters more difficult for him, he’s attracted to her. She’s smart, beautiful, and royally pissed at him for doing his job. I won’t mention how it ends, other than to say it’s not a classic romance, but it is romantic. Thoroughly confused?

Mysteries create a similar problem for me. The murder should appear as close to the beginning of the book as possible to draw in the reader. But should it? Yes, for the most part. But there are stories where the author must set the scene or develop the characters so the reader is invested in them before something in the story can take place. I suppose those who read mysteries expect that, but I’m a character-driven reader, and I want to care about them from page one. My book Murder Déjà Vu is considered a romantic suspense/mystery. There are only two pages of conflict between the H/h. The first two pages. They like each other almost immediately. To make matters worse, the body doesn’t show up until page thirty-something. Did I break the rules? Yes, but I believe I needed to develop the story first in order to make sense of what happens later.

Agents and editors are always looking for the next best thing in genre fiction, but what they really want is a clone of another author’s recently successful novel. How many Harry Potter imitations hit the bookstands after the book became a phenomenon? What about the copycats of The daVinci Code published after that success? Why didn’t a publisher pick up Amanda Hocking before she self-published and sold millions of copies of her fantasy books? Or E.L. James, whose Fifty Shades of Gray books have generated shameless counterfeits and opened up erotica, or so called Mommy Porn, to the masses? Those writers made their genres become the next best thing. How many of those in publishing are kicking themselves for not grabbing these future blockbusters at the outset? Lack of imagination? Not having their fingers on the pulse of the reading public? Adhering to the rules? I think so.

Good books that don’t fit a specific genre are rejected all the time by agents and editors because they don’t know how to sell them. Where do they fit on library and bookstores shelves? Can’t place them, reject the book.

Ebooks might be the answer, and self-publishing a means to that answer. No shelves. Just a blurb that gives readers a description to decide if the book is something they find interesting. It is happening, and cross-genre books are coming more into their own. I, for one, am glad. New fiction recipes are being created every day. I think I’ll call them Originals.

A good book is a good book, and a good book will find readers. There are quite a few authors finding that out every day, and the reading public is much richer for it.

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Polly Iyer was born on the coast of Massachusetts.  After studying at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, she lived in Italy, Boston, Atlanta, and now resides in the beautiful Piedmont region of South Caroline in an empty nest house with her husband; Joey, the timid cat; and a drooling mutt named Max.  Writing novels turned into her passion after careers in fashion, art, and business.  She is the author of eight suspense books:  Hooked, InSight, Murder Deja Vu, and the Diana Racine Psychic Suspense series –  Mind Games and Goddess of the Moon, plus three others written under a pen name.  Writing has turned her into quite the hermit, wearing comfortable clothes she wouldn’t be caught dead wearing on the outside, while she devises ways for life to be complicated for her characters.  Better them than her.  Check out Polly’s website at http://PollyIyer.com .

Type A, Type B or Type C?

Sometimes, I feel like Mr. Magoo – extremely nearsighted, unwilling to admit to even being a trifle nearsighted, and then lucky by the way things turned out. I say “yes” to so many things I want to do and then add in those “have to do” items until I find myself either having to sacrifice any chance of sleep or needing to prioritize what matters most. Perhaps, I could let some tasks drop by the wayside, but that isn’t my style. If I say I’m going to do it, whatever or how painful it is, it gets done.

Lately, I’ve been taking stock of this kind of behavior in myself, and in my friends. Books tell us we’re Type A. Wikipedia, today’s source of all information, offers this quick comparison summary of Type A and Type B.

Type A individuals are “ambitious, rigidly organized, highly status conscious, can be sensitive, care for other people, are truthful, impatient, always try to help others, take on more than they can handle, want other people to get to the point, proactive, and obsessed with time management. People with Type A personalities are often high-achieving ‘workaholics’ who multi-task, push themselves with deadlines and hate both delays and ambivalence.”

Type B people exist in a different world. Wikipedia says they “generally live at a lower stress level and typically work steadily, enjoying achievement but not becoming stressed when they are not achieved. When faced with competition, they do not mind losing and either enjoy the game or back down. They may be creative and enjoy exploring ideas and concepts. They are often reflective, thinking about the outer and inner worlds.” Often, Type B individuals “have a poor sense of time schedule.” Even just reading these definitions, I’m ready to pull my hair out at the idea of not being competitive and having no sense of a time schedule.

And yet, there is a lot to be said for knowing when to give or to step back for a moment. Perhaps, finding a compromise would make a lot of Type A or B people happier. Years ago, I met a man who gave up his corporate career to take pictures of flowers. He spent days catching each moment of a flower blooming so that he had the perfect sequence of the flower unfolding. To me, his work was precise and tedious, but he exhibited pure joy and patience in capturing every nuance of how a flower opened. I didn’t understand it then, but recently I came across a note mentioning his photographs and the many awards the pictures won. Those photos were always peaceful, but taking them had to involve stress, time management, and channeling energy to get the right shots.

Back then, I was too nearsighted to see anything beyond how boring I thought his work was, but now, looking at some of those pictures, I see that he combined Type A and Type B in a way that was lucky for all of us.  Maybe there is a way to be Type C….what do you think?

Guest Interview: Elizabeth Zelvin — Author, Psychotherapist, and Singer-Songwriter

AN INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH ZELVIN – -  AUTHOR, PSYCHOTHERAPIST, AND SINGER-SONGWRITER

1) What is your most recent book? Tell us thing about it.

DEATH WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE was published as an e-novella by BooksBNimble Press in December 2012. It’s the eighth entry in my mystery series about recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler and his friends, world-class codependent Barbara and computer genius Jimmy. Two of the three novels and all the short stories in the series are set in New York City. But in DEATH WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE, Barbara and Jimmy attend a couples workshop at a New Age intentional community known to the locals as Woo-Woo Farm. Bruce goes along to keep them company, and when the obnoxious relationship guru is murdered, he falls for the victim’s widow. So of course, they have to solve the murder.

2) What inspired you to write this book?

What inspired the mystery series as a whole was my desire to write about recovery from alcoholism, codependency, and other addictions and compulsive behaviors. Recovery is an amazing transformational process that sometimes verges on the miraculous. Many people know little or nothing about it, and many others think it must be dark and depressing. I wanted to create engaging characters in recovery to manage to have some fun in the process of turning their lives around.

DEATH WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE, in particular, was inspired by an urge to write about Woo-Woo Farm—a name I created before I learned that mystery lovers, especially those on the e-list DorothyL, often use “woo-woo” as a term for the paranormal element in a mystery story. There’s no paranormal in my novella (well, except for the Tibetan monk who claims he levitates), but the characters and setting are pretty far out. Jimmy calls the place “a dude ranch for space cadets,” and Bruce explains that “anybody who knows about Esalen and Sedona but wouldn’t be caught dead going there called it Woo-Woo Farm.”

3) If it is part of a series, what made you follow these characters? Do you have a favorite character?

As I’ve said, I wanted to follow the process of people in recovery who are trying hard to grow and become better people while having periodic setbacks and stumbling into murders. I love Bruce, Barbara, and Jimmy equally (doesn’t everyone love all their children the same?), though I’m tickled to find that some of my readers has one favorite or another. I love Bruce’s sardonic voice and his not-too-well-concealed heart of gold. Barbara is a lot of fun to write. Like me, she’s a nice Jewish girl from Queens, but because she isn’t me, I get to take her over the top with her compulsive helping and minding everybody’s business. And Jimmy is a great big teddy bear of tremendous sweetness. I could have made him a curmudgeon, but then people might have thought I’d based him on my husband. As it is, my husband claims I’ve stolen all his one-liners.

4) How did you choose the title?

LOL, because DEATH WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE is the one work I’ve had published where my publisher made me change the title. The whole series, as an idea, started with the title of the first novel, DEATH WILL GET YOU SOBER. In that one, Bruce gets sober. The other novels are DEATH WILL HELP YOU LEAVE HIM, which is about codependency and love addiction or addictive relationships, and DEATH WILL EXTEND YOUR VACATION, in which Bruce, Barbara, and Jimmy take shares in a lethal clean and sober group house in the Hamptons. The short stories are “Death Will Clean Your Closet,” “Death Will Tie Your Kangaroo Down,” “Death Will Trim Your Tree,” and “Death Will Tank Your Fish.” Three of those appeared in anthologies, the fourth in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Two were nominees for the Agatha Award for Best Short Story, and a third was a nominee for the Derringer Award for Best Short Story.

I love my titles. They’re funny, they match, and they tell you what the story is about. But when it came to this one, my publisher, Edgar-winning author Julie Smith of BooksBNimble, said my original title, Death Will Improve Your Relationship, wouldn’t do. This was e-publishing, and she said the word “relationship” was too long to figure in a good design for a cover the size of a postage stamp. She proposed DEATH WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE instead. We, er, discussed it, and she won. The funny thing is that everyone loves the title, and the cover is terrific.

5) Tell us about you — What makes you want to write? Do you have

any writing rituals? Are you working on a new project? What do you

do besides writing?

I’m a lifelong writer. I first said I wanted to be one when I was seven years old. I’d published two books of poetry, a book on gender and addictions, and a lot of professional articles and book chapters before my first novel came out when I was already in my sixties. I’ve also been writing weekly blog posts for the group mystery blog Poe’s Deadly Daughters for six years now, as well as biweekly posts for SleuthSayers, a group of “crime writers and crime fighters,” for the past year or two.

My only ritual is making sure everyone leaves me alone. I can’t fathom writers who work in Starbucks. I write best if I come to it fresh, ie use my morning energy. It helps if I can resist checking my email before I start to write. If I need to write later in the day and push myself through to achieve a certain goal, I may take a nap on the couch so that when I get up, my writing brain thinks it’s morning again.

I’ve just completed a short story for submission to an anthology on a Cold War theme. This is a new angle for me. I often use shorter works to explore voices, characters, settings, and points of view that are very different from my mystery series. “Shifting Is for the Goyim,” published in 2012, is about a nice Jewish girl who’s a rising country music star and a shapeshifter. I’ll have two stories out in 2013, one in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine that’s about art theft at the Metropolitan Museum, and one in the e-zine Mysterical-E about a Cape Cod whale watch, featuring an 11-year-old girl who’s being molested. BooksBNimble will bring out DEATH WILL GET YOU SOBER as an e-book this spring and, I hope, the other novels later in the year.

Besides writing, I’m a psychotherapist. For the last dozen years, I’ve been working online on my online therapy website, LZcybershrink.com. It fits well with my writing, and I’m currently working with clients on three different continents. I’m also a singer-songwriter. Last year I achieved the lifelong dream of recording an album of my songs. It’s called OUTRAGEOUS OLDER WOMAN. My most recent performance was at the 92nd Street Y in New York. I combined my therapist and songwriter hats to give a talk and performance to seniors on “Maturity & Chutzpah”—in other words, how to be an outrageous older woman. It’s like getting to Carnegie Hall: you practice and you practice.

6) Where can readers learn more about you, your books, and your music?

My author website is at http://elizabethzelvin.com, my music website at http://lizzelvin.com. You can also find me on Facebook.

Guest Blogger: Edith Maxwell aka Tace Baker — An Experience in Self-Publishing

Debra, thanks so much for inviting me over!

I went on a new adventure last week. It occurred to me that two of my short stories that were published in the last ten years included some dark back story for two of the main characters in Speaking of Murder.

My story “Reduction in Force” describes revenge after corporate layoff and was published in Thin Ice, an anthology of mystery and crime fiction, by Level Best Books , 2010. The main character is Lauren Rousseau’s sister, Jackie, who is an important secondary character in Speaking of Murder.

“Obake for Lance” was a short story about murderous revenge published in Riptide, an anthology of mystery and crime fiction, by Level Best Books , 2004. This story describes a dark incident in the past of Lauren’s best friend, Elise, who plays a pivotal role in Speaking of Murder.

The rights to both stories reverted to me a year after publication. People who read Speaking of Murder have asked me when the next Lauren Rousseau book is coming out. It won’t be out anytime soon, despite being mostly written, because I need to keep writing and promoting the Local Foods mysteries around the demands of my day job and daily life.

But it occurred to me that these two stories are directly related to Lauren and might satisfy some of the hunger of readers. So I read my writing colleague Kaye George ‘s booklet The Road to Self-Publishing and cleaned up the formatting.

With the help of Kaye’s booklet, I figured out how to publish the stories for most formats through Smashwords and for Kindle through Amazon. And while it requires some careful attention (that is, don’t start doing it at night if you’re a morning person), it really isn’t that hard.

Through the unfailingly helpful Guppies I found a cover artist, Stanzalone Design , who uses open-source stock photographs and adds the lettering, which makes her covers very affordable, so I commissioned a cover for each. Which I love!

I also realized that Obake was the wrong word to use in that story. The real name of the triangular rice-dough pastry filled with sweet bean paste is Yatsuhashi, so the newly published story is called “Yatsuhashi for Lance.” It’s up on Amazon and is already #25 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Travel > Asia > Japan and #77 in Books > Travel > Asia > Japan > General . Cool! (We won’t worry about the fact that it isn’t nonfiction…) It should be up for Nook, Kobo, and Apple formats before the end of January.

I also liked the cover for “Reduction in Force” since it takes places in a software company and tea plays a critical role in the revenge. It’s up on Amazon , too.

This exercise gave me confidence in the world of self publishing, even though I have “non-me” publishers for all my books so far. I can track sales and let people who ask know that there is more of my writing out there they can read. For a mere ninety-nine cents! I’m not expecting to get rich on a couple of short stories but I like having them available. And you never know…

Have you self published anything? Do you order short stories for your ereader? If you don’t have an ereader and a story isn’t available in paper, would you buy it and read it on your PC?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Edith Maxwell writes the Local Foods Mysteries. A TINE TO LIVE, A TINE TO DIE introduces organic farmer Cam Flaherty and a Locavore Club (Kensington Publishing, May 2013). Edith once owned and operated the smallest certified-organic farm in Essex County, Massachusetts.

Tace Baker, the pen name of author Edith Maxwell, is the author of SPEAKING OF MURDER (Barking Rain Press) featuring Quaker linguistics professor Lauren Rousseau. Edith holds a PhD in linguistics and is a member of Amesbury Monthly Meeting of Friends.

A mother and technical writer, Edith is a fourth-generation Californian but lives north of Boston in an antique house with her beau and three cats.

Find her at http://www.facebook.com/EdithMaxwellAuthorhttp://www.facebook.com/EdithMaxwellAuthor , @edithmaxwell, and http://www.edithmaxwell.comwww.edithmaxwell.com. Tace Baker can be found at http://www.tacebaker.comwww.tacebaker.com , @tacebaker, and http://www.facebook.com/TaceBaker.

GOOD-BYE AND GOOD RIDDANCE 2012 – OR IS IT? by Debra H. Goldstein

GOOD-BYE AND GOOD RIDDANCE 2012 – OR IS IT? by Debra H. Goldstein

Good-bye and good riddance 2012.  It was a year of insane running around and life altering events, but it also was a year of wonderful trips and sharing moments of excitement and joy with family and friends.  There was the birth of a second career as my first novel and several short stories won awards and brought me both an opportunity to travel the country meeting fascinating people and a way to use my passion for writing to benefit others.  There were hours spent in hospitals and doctors’ offices as a patient and as a note-taker.  A minor knee surgery paled next to others who were diagnosed with breast cancer, lymphoma, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s.  I had empathy when friends, as I have in the past, lost a parent, but I couldn’t even begin to comprehend the pain being felt when the twenty-five year old son of friends died.

I will remember 2012 as the final year of a personal decade that passed so quickly I could barely keep track of each year.  It also always will be the year my youngest daughter got engaged to the love of her life.  Through her eyes, I once again remembered how and why I fell in love with her father. 

2012 was the year I realized I had fully become my mother.  I actually sound like her when I harp to my children how things should be done or share my worries with them about their choices.  I know I should keep my thoughts about their lives to myself, but I understand how fast things become uncontrollable.  It is the fear of these unknown and unexpected changes that is causing my friends and me to rethink what is important to us.  Our answers are different, but for the first time, a lot of us are balancing thoughts of mortality with what we still want to accomplish.  2012 has been a year of reflection and decision-making.  2013, I hope will be a year of effectuation. 

So, I say goodbye and good riddance to 2012 as having been a difficult year, but then again, so many good things happened during it that I’m a little sad to see it go. 

An Arthroscopic View of Writing by Debra H. Goldstein

An Arthroscopic View of Writing by Debra H. Goldstein

Life often gets in the way of planned obligations.  Normally, I write a blog every two weeks, but somehow arthroscopic knee surgery dropped the blog to the bottom of my “to do” list.  It actually turned out to be a nice break.

Not only did being laid up give me the time to sit back and prioritize what I needed to do for recovery, family, and work, but also it made me think why writing is important to me.  The most simplistic reason is that I love the feeling I get when my ability to string words together, like in my earlier blogs “Maybe I Should Hug You” or “My Daughter is in Love,” articulate emotions and thoughts that my readers resonate with.  I like hearing that I’ve expressed exactly what they feel, but haven’t been able to say.  There also is satisfaction in embellishing a funny moment or memory into a short story or novel.

In some ways, my writing is exactly like arthroscopic surgery.  For example, the surgeon made some small incisions in my knee and then inserted a small camera so as to get a clear view of the extent of the damage.  I take an idea and zero on it until I get a clear view of what in the idea would make a good article or story.  After getting the entire picture of my knee, the surgeon inserted another tool to hold, remove and shave the damaged medial and lateral meniscus tears.  Once I know my general theme, I use paragraphs to build my thoughts in an orderly manner from a topic sentence to the concluding point I want to make.  The surgeon did a last check for rough edges and then removed the tools and bandaged my knee.  I take the written piece I create and proofread it for glaring errors.  Then, I read it aloud to see if the words flow smoothly.  Based upon my observations, I make my final corrections and save the piece.  My surgeon sent me home with a walker, pain pills, instructions to tether myself to an ice machine, and a prescription for physical therapy.  I wait a day or two and read the piece again.  If it needs a little support, I make the changes to strengthen it.  Two weeks later, my surgeon assures me my knee is healing well and I soon will be back to my normal routine.  I submit or post the article or story not knowing whether it will be published or how readers will react to my work.

The only thing I know for sure is that after a few days of rest, I will have to write again.  The act of writing has become a part of my soul and very being.