Susan Spann's Blog, page 91

In Which We Celebrate Clover

In honor of “Weed Appreciation Day,” I’d like to talk about clover.

As a child, I loved the patches of clover that grew in my parents’ front yard. I taught myself to make chains of the long-stemmed clover flowers and spent many hours searching the patches in hopes of finding a lucky four-lobed leaf. (Though I never did spot one.)

The clover leaves felt soft and cool underfoot in the heat of summer, and the blossoms had no fragrance but they bobbed like little white puffballs in the breeze.

Never once did I realize people considered clover a weed and a pest.

Fast forward a decade or two (ok, three).

Four years ago we replaced our front lawn. We tore out the ugly old one (infested with nasty bermuda grass) and put in a lovely bluegrass and fescue sod. It was lush and blue-green – a pleasure to behold.

Then, last spring, I noticed a patch of clover starting up along one edge. I considered pulling it out, but decided not to. This spring, the clover covers about a three-foot section of lawn. By summer it will have grown even more.

The gardener in me says I should pull it, kill it, remove it – before it has the chance to take root and take over.

The child in me remembers the feel of clover under my feet.

Last week I took a walk in the clover patch. It felt every bit as good as I remembered.

Afterward, the adult I am had a talk with the child I was … and decided the clover stays. In many ways, we all have to grow up. In other ways, not so much.

What do you think about clover? Dandelions? Are there any weeds you’re willing to leave where they grow?

Author Estate Planning: Who Will You Trust?

Last week’s #PubLaw post talked a little about wills in the author estate plan. Today, we’ll look at the second common estate planning device: the trust.

In many places, having a trust allows your estate to bypass probate. This, in turn, usually means a shorter administration period and lower costs.

Trusts also allow for greater flexibility in distribution of the author’s assets, including intellectual property rights like copyright.

Unlike a will, which can often be written without the assistance of counsel, trusts generally require an attorney’s aid. However, the extra cost of drafting a trust is usually more than offset by the savings on probate costs.

Most people (authors included) will create a revocable trust, meaning a trust which can be altered or terminated during the lifetime of the person who created it (the “settlor,” in legalese). This allows for greater flexibility, and enables the author to change the beneficiaries at will or as needs change.

Trusts are administered by a “Trustee.” During the settlor/author’s life, he or she normally serves as trustee, and designates (in the trust documents) who will serve as trustee after his or her death. Like all other provisions of a revocable trust, this is subject to change during the settlor’s lifetime, but only if the settlor chooses to make a change.

While trusts are often the most flexible way to hold and administer copyrights upon an author’s death, estate planning is a personal process and each author needs to investigate all the options to find the one which best suits the author’s individual needs.

Join me next week, when we’ll look at the actual language authors can use to establish who will own copyrights and other intellectual property rights that continue after the author’s death.

Have you got a trust? A will? Are you just starting the estate planning process? Have questions? Hop into the comments: I’d love to hear from you.

 

Little Fish, Big Fish ….

Every little fish….

Grows up to become a big fish ….

And sometimes a younger fish has to help an older fish out for a little while.

Such is the situation with me this week.

Try not to be crabby that I’m gone.

An Interview with Tracy Grant

Please welcome Tracy Grant, author of the new historical mystery THE PARIS AFFAIR (Kensington, March 26, 2013)

Teresa (Tracy) Grant studied British history at Stanford University and received the Firestone Award for Excellence in Research for her honors thesis on shifting conceptions of honor in late fifteenth century England. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, with her young daughter and three cats, and is on the board of the Merola Opera Program, a professional training program for opera singers, pianists, and stage directors. Her real life heroine is her daughter Mélanie, who is very cooperative about Mummy’s writing. Tracy is currently at work on her next book chronicling the adventures of Malcolm and Suzanne Rannoch.

In the wake of the Battle of Waterloo, Paris is a house divided. The triumphant Bourbons flaunt their victory with lavish parties, while Bonapartists seek revenge only to be captured and executed. Amid the turmoil, British attaché and intelligence agent Malcolm Rannoch and his wife, Suzanne, discover that his murdered half sister, Princess Tatiana Kirsanova, may have borne a child—a secret she took to the grave. And Malcolm suspects there was more than mere impropriety behind her silence. . . .

As Malcolm and Suzanne begin searching for answers, they learn that the child was just one of many secrets Tatiana had been keeping. The princess was the toast of Paris when she arrived in the glamorous city, flirting her way into the arms of more than a few men—perhaps even those of Napoleon himself—and the father must be among them. But in the mêlée of the Napoleonic Wars, she was caught up in a deadly game of court intrigue, and now Malcolm and Suzanne must race against time to save his sister’s child from a similar fate. . . .

I met Tracy through Facebook (yep, Facebook – it’s a great place for authors to meet!) and I’m thrilled she agreed to join me for an interview today.

And so: on with the questions!

Where did you grow up? Will you share a favorite story from your childhood?

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I still live. My parents took me to old movies a lot. When I was six we saw the Laurence Olivier-Greer Garson Pride and Prejudice. I loved it and immediately wanted to read the book (or rather have it read to me). My mom said “I’m not sure you’ll like it, but we can try”. I thought it was wonderful—to me, at that age, it was a story about girls (older than me but young enough that I could identify with them) dealing with their sisters and parents, growing up, falling in love. (Every time I reread Pride and Prejudice I get different things from it, but I was totally hooked at the age of six).

What inspired you to start writing?

I’ve been making up stories as long as I can remember (inspired by my mom who read me books and told me stories) and writing them down since third grade when we were assigned writing a story in class and I realized I had a wealth of characters and plots inside my head. After that I was always writing a story or a play. On a family vacation when I was thirteen my mom and I began to plot a Regency romance together. We worked on it off on and on for several years. I went on to college at Stanford where I majored in history. The summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, my mom and I went back to our Regency romance in a very focused way. We sold it (to our own amazement) the next winter. That book, The Widow’s Gambit, was published in May 1988, just before I graduated from Stanford.

My mom and I went on to write seven Regency romances and four novellas under the name Anthea Malcolm and one Regency/Peninsular War-set historical romance, Dark Angel, under the name Anna Grant (it’s since been reissued under Tracy Grant as it connects to later books). After my mom died in 1995, I went on to write three historical romances as Tracy  Grant. But I found that elements of historical fiction and historical mystery were creeping more and more into my romances. My mom had introduced to the British “golden age” mysteries by writers such as Dorothy Sayers, Marjorie Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. Those are still some of my favorite books—particularly the ones where there’s a love story threaded through the mystery series and a romantic partnership involved in the mystery solving.

The summer between high school and college I discovered Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles and introduced my mom to them (leading to endless discussions). I realized that what I really wanted to write was an historical suspense novel with a love story in it but with room for the sort of intricate suspense plot I’ve always loved in mysteries and the intricately-detailed social and political historical background I’ve always loved in historical fiction. That was the beginning of the Malcolm & Suzanne Rannoch books.

If you could go back in time and share one writing lesson with “new writer you” before starting your first manuscript … what would that be?

The more you think things through in advance, the less you have to revise. At least in my case. I’m still someone who writes multiple drafts, but with advance planning I’m much less likely to have to throw away scenes.

Your new novel, THE PARIS AFFAIR, is a fast-paced historical mystery set in Paris shortly after the Battle of Waterloo. What inspired you to set your novel in such tumultuous times?

I wrote about Malcolm and Suzanne Rannoch at the Congress of Vienna (Vienna Waltz) and then the battle of Waterloo (Imperial Scandal). It seemed a natural progression to set the next book in the series in post-Waterloo Paris. So many of the tensions from the Napoleonic Wars are still simmering beneath the glamorous veneer of Restoration Paris. Foreign troops are encamped in the Bois de Boulogne. In what came to be known as the White Terror, the “Ultra Royalists” seek vengeance on those who supported Napoleon. A number of the real historical people who were important actors at the Congress of Vienna (and important characters in Vienna Waltz) also played key roles in Paris in the early days of the Bourbon Restoration. Talleyrand, his niece Dorothée, her sister Wilhelmine of Sagan. Talleyrand is something of a mentor to Malcolm, and Suzanne and Dorothée became close friends in Vienna Waltz. I was able to write about Napoleon’s minister of police, Joseph Fouché, whose ability to stay in power through régime changes was perhaps only equaled by Talleyrand. And of course the Duke of Wellington, who was an important character in Imperial Scandal, was there. I was able to work a lot of real life political and romantic intrigues into the plot.

Do you have a favorite author, book, or genre? If so, who (or what) is it, and why?

Pretty much impossible to pin it down to one. But I’ll say Pride and Prejudice, because it’s a superb book and because it started my fascination with the Regency era at the age of six. My parents took me to see the Greer Garson/Laurence Olivier film. I loved it and immediately wanted to read the book (or rather have it read to me). My mom said “I’m not sure you’ll like it, but we can try”. I thought it was wonderful—to me, at that age, it was a story about girls (older than me but young enough that I could identify with them) dealing with their sisters and parents, growing up, falling in love. Every time I reread “Pride and Prejudice” I get different things from it, but I was totally hooked at the age of six.

Your novel features a pair of protagonists, British attaché and intelligence agent Malcolm Rannoch and his wife, Suzanne, who must solve a mystery centering on the murder of Malcolm’s half-sister. What was your favorite aspect of writing a novel with dual protagonists? What did you find most challenging?

I love writing the interplay between Malcolm and Suzanne. Their marriage began essentially as a marriage of convenience, and they still have a number of secrets between them. Neither shares their feelings easily, but they really bond over solving mysteries together. So their relationship develops in the course of their investigations. As they talk through the mystery, they are confronting issues in their relationship. As they face adventures together they are seeing new sides of each other. It’s fun to write them together and it’s fun to intercut between scenes of them handling different parts of the investigation.

To the extent that there are challenges, I guess the biggest challenge is deciding whose point of view to write a scene from. Usually it’s pretty clear to me, but occasionally I get into a scene and realize it would work better from the other character’s POV.

Do you have a favorite scene or section from THE PARIS AFFAIR? If so (and if you can tell us about it without revealing any spoilers!), what makes that scene stand out for you?

I have several favorite scenes, but one I can talk about without major spoilers occurs at the opening of the book. In somewhat raffish disguise, Malcolm and Suzanne have gone to meet with Antoine Rivère, a former official in the Bonapartist government who was a British agent. They meet Rivère at a tavern by the Seine. Suzanne creates a distraction by singing a bawdy song while Malcolm talks to Rivère. Rivère threatens to reveal information that will shake the British delegation to its core if the British don’t get him out of France. Then he tells Malcolm his murdered half-sister, Tatiana Kirsanova, left a child behind when she died. Just then a tavern brawl breaks out.

I love writing action-filled openings. I enjoy writing Malcolm and Suzanne in disguise, away from the formality of diplomatic and court life, and it was a lot of fun writing a tavern brawl. I watched a tavern brawl in the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie several times when I was writing it :-).

What is the last book you read, and why did you choose to read it?

The Sound of Broken Glass by Deborah Crombie. I love this series – wonderful, intricate mysteries and fascinating developing relationships among the ongoing characters. Each book is a riveting adventure and at the same time feels like a visit with old friends. Deb is also a great friend, and I bought the book at a recent signing and reading she did.

How did you push yourself to get past difficult moments in writing and editing THE PARIS AFFAIR? Do you have a favorite place to write or to edit your work?

I write almost every day at a Peet’s Coffee & Tea at a nearby outdoor mall. I have daughter who is now fifteen months old, and they are really welcoming to both of us. My daughter Mélanie has a snack and plays while I work, then we take a break and walk around (she is still very proud of learning to walk) and visit a play park in the mall, and then we go back to Peet’s and I work some more while Mélanie naps.

I get past the difficult points by telling myself I just need to write 100 words and then I can tale a break and look at Facebook or Twitter or check my email :-). After a 300 words or so I usually don’t need so many breaks. I try to write at least 1000 words a day. When I’m editing it’s similar, but I’ll take mini-breaks between scenes instead of based on word count.

Do you have any upcoming signings or readings?

I’ll be reading from and signing The Paris Affair at Book Passage in Corte Madera (near San Francisco) on March 30th at 4:00 pm. I would love to see friendly faces in the audience! If you can’t be there but would like a signed copy, you can order one through the store, and I’ll sign it and personalize it on the 30th. http://www.bookpassage.com/event/teresa-grant-paris-affair

And now, the speed round:

Plotter or pantser?

Plotter. But I do draft scenes as I’m plotting. I write in Scrivener, which I find makes it very easy to write scenes out of order.

Coffee, tea, or bourbon?

During the day, I go back and forth between lattes and Earl Grey. But at night, I quite like writing with a glass of red or sparkling wine. Or occasionally a single malt :-).

Socks or no socks?

Tights in the winter. Bare legs in the summer.

Cats, dogs, or reptiles?

We have three cats now. I can’t imagine not having cats – I often work with one of more of them curled up on my lap. I had a dog who was a wonderful writing companion until a few years ago, and when my daughter is  bit older, we will add another dog to the family.

For dinner: Italian, Mexican, Burgers or Thai?

Italian. I’m looking forward to dinner at a favorite Italian restaurant, Il Fornaio, after my event at Book Passage.

Thank you, Tracy, for joining us today! I’m so glad you were able to take the time to talk with me about THE PARIS AFFAIR!

You can find out more about Tracy at her website, and you can find THE PARIS AFFAIR starting tomorrow (March 26, 2013) in your local bookstore and at any online outlet. Pre-order information is here!

Have You Ever Worn Hakama?

Hakama are traditional Japanese pleated pants worn over kimono or under a tunic or surcoat.

Traditionally, only men wore hakama, though in the modern era people of either gender can wear them. Hakama aren’t exactly “pants,” because only one of the two varieties of hakama has divided legs (the other essentially resembles a pleated skirt). Still, “pants” provides the closest accurate analogue in terms of Western styles and sensibilities.

In medieval Japan, hakama were made of silk or cotton, usually solid-colored though sometimes with a pattern (often stripes). Striped hakama were usually worn with more formal kimono, though hakama could also be worn with a surcoat rather than a full-length robe.

Samurai wore special hakama for audiences with the Shogun. Although the pleated pants once formed a standard part of the samurai’s daily wardrobe, in modern times hakama are mostly worn on formal occasions.

Have you ever worn (or seen someone wearing) hakama? Would you wear them if the opportunity presented itself?

Will you? Or Will you Not?

Our #PubLaw series on estate planning continues today with a brief discussion of wills.

As we mentioned last week, authors who have no written estate plan will find their estates (and their copyrighted works) subjected to the laws of the state (or country) where the author resided at the time of his or her death. Generally speaking, the government is not the best candidate to design your estate plan.

Which means you need to do it yourself.

In most states (and countries), the estate planning choices are wills and trusts. (We’ll look trusts next week.)

A will (or a “testament”) is a writing which disposes of property belonging to the testator (the person who wrote the will) at the time of his or her death.

In most places, if the testator’s estate equals or exceeds $100,000 in value, the will must be administered through a probate proceeding.

In probate, the will is administered, and the decedent’s property distributed, by a court or by a court-appointed executor (with or without direct judicial supervision). Probate doesn’t require an attorney, but in most U.S. probates the executor does hire legal counsel. Probate lawyers’ fees are generally set by statute (often on a sliding scale, and usually measured as a percentage of the estate).

Authors with small estates (less than $100,000 cash value at the time of death) may find a will sufficient for their needs. A will can contain specific language stating how copyrights and creative works should be distributed, and to whom, and how the author would like them managed after death. (We’ll talk about these options in coming weeks.)

At a minimum, an author needs a handwritten will (also called a “holographic” will) and also a list of copyrights, publishers, and similar information the author’s heirs can use to collect and manage the author’s creative works after his or her death. Published authors should seriously consider paying for a professionally drafted will (or trust) to ensure the estate plan properly transfers copyrights and creative works as intended.

Authors whose estates exceed $100,000 should consider a trust, a document which offers more flexibility than a will – and may avoid probate altogether. But that’s the topic of next week’s #PubLaw post.

Have questions about authors’ wills? Feel free to ask them in the comments!

These Aren’t the Fish You’re Looking for….(Part 1)

I set up my aquarium for seahorses, but it isn’t Cygnus, or Ceti, or even Ghillie, who ended up hogging the spotlight.

Instead, the tank’s biggest star is a fish I almost didn’t acquire at all, and who nearly forced me take him back to the fish store.

Our watchman goby, Emperor Maximus Angryfish, has easily as much personality as anything else in the tank. His constant glare never fails to make me smile.

His photos garner the most attention – on Twitter, on Facebook, and on this blog – despite the fact that I’m sure he would thoroughly disapprove of such shenanigans.

Yet he started out as a canary in a coal mine.

The seahorse reef was my first marine aquarium and I worried about keeping the salinity levels constant. I didn’t know, for sure, whether I could keep the delicate saltwater species alive. Two weeks after I set up the tank and arranged the live rocks on the reef, the fish store owner suggested I add a single fish to help with establishing the ecosystem (I ran it “live rock only” at first to help the nitrogen cycle get started without too much bioload).

He suggested an “easy” fish that would get along with the seahorses and not cause trouble with corals: a watchman goby.

Only one problem: watchman gobies are yellow – and fairly plain. (At least, I thought so at the time. I’ve since discovered that Max has tiny blue spots on his sides and red on the edge of his fins, though he only flashes the colors when truly angry.) But they’re also inexpensive, and hardy, and if you need a canary for your coal mine, yellow is the natural choice.

So I brought the fish home.

But that isn’t the end of the story….

(Tune in next Tuesday for the conclusion of Max’s tale.)

 

 

That was awkward … but this doesn’t have to be.

In honor of  “Awkward Moments Day” (March 18, 2013) I thought I’d mention an awkward moment all authors should strive to avoid:

The moment when a prospective publisher looks at your Internet presence and asks “What on earth was (s)he thinking?”

Because they look. Before they sign you. And while I can’t guarantee that an author’s awkward, offensive, or overly whiny presence will make the difference between an absolute yes and a maybe, it can absolutely transform a maybe into a no.

So … how to avoid turning off a publisher (or a reader)?

1. Talk about other subjects more often than you talk about yourself. Obviously, your blog exists to express your views. Ditto your author Twitter and Facebook pages. But there’s a difference between interesting content and navel-gazing. Learn that difference.

2. Smile and the world smiles with you. Whine and you whine alone. Self-evident, but true: people – including publishers – would rather sign (and read) a happy person. That’s not to say you can never express a critical view – but pay attention to the tone of your social media presence. Positive people attract and keep more readers.

3. Produce valuable, interesting content, and tread carefully when your subject is divisive. You don’t have to avoid charged commentary altogether (though that is a legitimate choice), but when you do engage on sensitive topics, do so with maturity and finesse. (Note: name-calling does not constitute “finesse.”)

4. Remember: Memory is long, and Google is forever. You can delete offensive or ill-advised comments, but people will remember that you made them. More importantly, Google’s caching protocols allow savvy users to pull up content even after it’s been erased from a website.

Don’t write a brilliant manuscript and then drop a bomb on your writing career.

Your reputation doesn’t start when a publisher signs you. It started the moment you made your virtual presence known.

Be smart. Be positive. Be professional.

And remember: Emperor Maximus Angryfish disapproves of all shenanigans – but especially those that can hurt an author’s career.

Mempo: Mask of the Samurai

Medieval Japanese armor featured a number of masks and face guards, each of which had a different name and style.

To a certain extent, all Japanese armored masks were designed for two purposes: first, to protect the wearer’s face in combat and, second, to terrify or intimidate the viewer.

The mempo (or menpo) -style mask covered teh wearer’s face from nose to chin, and often featured a scowling mouth and a mustache (with or without a beard, and frequently made from real hair or bristles).

The second mask from the top is menpo or mempo style.

Samurai wore masks made of metal, leather, wood and lacquer, and during the medieval period masks were often decorative as well as functional.

A mempo mask appears in my upcoming novel, Claws of the Cat, though you might have to look fairly carefully to find it!

Have you ever seen a mempo mask in a museum or on display? If you were samurai, which style of mask would you prefer?

 

An Open Letter for You … and also for Me

This letter is for everyone who likes my book – and also for those who might not.

Thank you for reading it.

 

Thank you for spending hours of your life with a ninja detective, a Jesuit priest, a weapons dealer, a crotchety maid, and a kitten whose name I won’t tell you for most of the novel.

I wanted to thank you here because I won’t be responding to any reviews in public. That doesn’t mean I don’t care.

I do.

In fact – and this may surprise you – if you read my book, I appreciate you, whether or not you liked it. Because you read it. You gave it a chance.

I would love it if everyone loved my book, but I don’t expect that any more than I think I’ll find a live unicorn in my bathtub. (Hey – it could happen!)

Readers’ tastes vary – and while I hope that many, many people are fans of Hiro, Father Mateo, and The-Kitten-Who-Won’t-Be-Named, if you’re not among them I do not blame you for it. (I might suspect we have different taste in books, but I trust you’ll forgive me for that particular notion.)

This is easy for me to say at the moment, since the book isn’t out yet. That’s part of the reason I’m writing this letter now.  Authors catch a lot of flack on the ‘net and in social media for reacting badly to negative comments about their work.

I’ve made a commitment to an alternate path.

To remember that you, the reader, are the reason why I do this. To remember your tastes may not be the same as mine. And to appreciate you – regardless of your opinions – because the fact that you gave my book a chance makes you special in my eyes.

So, that. And thank you for reading.

And for those who might like something a little more humorous, I’m at the Debutante Ball today, along with some aquatic friends who have pretty nice claws of their own.