Off to Florida

We/re taking off amid rain and snow for sunny Florida tomorrow. I'm attending a writing conference, and doing a reading with a manuscript critique and an agent/editor appointment. In other words, the Full Monte. I practiced the reading twice, once before my writing group and again before a public speaking group. Still am not perfect, to wit, I stumble over a few word, especially introducing myself.

This is kind of a last ditch effort to revive my so-called career as a crime fiction writer. No matter what the upshot is, it will be fun to be in Florida with fellow writers, schoozing and boozing and talking writing.

The last time I attended this particular conference, four years ago, an agent asked for the completed draft of Promiscuous Mode, and guess what? I'm still waiting to hear from him. He didn't take phone call or answer emails, nor did he return my SASE. This is the kind of action that knifes a writer's heart. (See a previous post from Kate Flora's blog).

This morning I gave myself possibly the worst manicure in the history of hands. Somehow it's all chipped and icky looking and it takes a lot to make colorless nail polish look icky. I managed.


Last night I watched the ending of Pride and Prejudice, with forays to the Academy Awards. Lots of drama and conflict on both. I'll miss "In Treatment" while I'm gone, but there's always a way to catch up on HBO programs.

We watched Frederico Fellini's 8 1/2 last week. What an interesting film. And how Felliniesque, with a few touches I had noticed in La Dolce Vita. There were tons of roles for aging women, not something you often see. Anouk Aimee (not aging) chain smoking and looking incredibly cool. If you haven't seen some Fellini movies, hie thee to the nearest rental store. Or Netflix. We are liking Netflix a lot.

Maybe I'll have writing tips, or writing gossip, or even good news when I return. To repeat, this is sort of a last ditch effort. In March I'm going to plow full speed ahead, damn the torpedos into Such Stuff As Dreams.

Onward,

Grapeshot

ABNA Finalists

Best of the best. I haven't read anywhere near ALL of the finalists, but these two are the best so far. Great writing. Good stories.


Knocking Over the Fishbowl - Official ABNA Entrant, an Amazon Shortby David Oppegaard (Author)

http://www.davidoppegaard.com/


The Stars Here Are Mostly Planes - Official ABNA Entrant
Author: Sarah Harris

http://pinkyspaperhaus.com/

ABNA Contest

I've been reading a few of the ABNA finalists, and have noted that most of the prospective winners have blogs and that indeed, many of them are published writers, so don't feel too badly if you didn't make the cut. Competition was stiff.

I have two favorites, neither crime fiction. This morning I read an entry, must be young adult, although I couldn't tell for sure. The author is a self-admitted romance writer, but someone on the message board was squawking that there were no romance finalists, and since the couple pages I read seemed like teen-age romance, I guess it's Y.A. Young Adult to the uninitiated.

Y.A. is very hot right now, and I'm probably making a big mistake not to write my Y.A. before the California book.

Back to the teenie bopper romance, there was a glaring writing mistake in the first paragraph, which made me wonder how the story reached the finals. Well, maybe it's good story. I understand now, that good story tops bad writing.

Repeat after me. Good story tops bad writing.

I'm reading a California book, Pasadena, a big whopping historical that is holding my attention so far. Plan to take it to Florida because it's long enough for two plane rides and some before bed reading. It begins with a gripping Prologue. Didn't know "regular' novels did that. Well, anything to catch the reader's attention.

I'm preparing my reading for the mystery conference. Discovered that the group I practiced in front of didn't know what a "back cover blurb" was. Also didn't understand that all hackers have handles.

Never assume anything.

Ah, the sun is out! The snow plows were in our neighborhood late last night and early this morning. Did anyone say sleep?

Yesterday was cat blog day and the cats were lumps of fur, fat and bone. Did absolutely nothing bloggable except that Annie discovered that twist ties make a good cat toy, and Thisbe did a fine 50 yard dash when the DHL man rang the doorbell rather late in the day.

Next post I'll list my two ABNA favorites. Go read them and leave a comment. If you are an Amazon customer. Or whatever.

Grapeshot

It Ain't Easy Being Green

We are now a one car household, which demands communication and scheduling but we manage.

For the prior month, we had planned to drive to Wellesley today for 1) Dr., 2) barber, 3) Dentist, 4) Roche Brothers, 5) hair dresser, 6) lunch, and 7) over to Natick to pick up pants that were being hemmed. On the way home we would stop at Walmart for cat litter and get gas.

Things started to fall apart yesterday when the hair dresser called and had to re-schedule due to a funeral. Well, not happy, but okay.

This morning, the snow started at 7:00 a.m., not at 10:00 as forecast. Then the dentist called to change times.

Everything fell down like a house of cards, and after some fancy footwork, everything worked out except the hairdresser, where I go tomorrow, adding another 60 miles to the car.

Overnight, gas jumped from $2.97 to $3.15. Yikes!

While I waited for S.O. at the barber, I read a fancy-schmancy Wellesley-Weston magazine. All kitchens must have an island with granite counters. It's de riguer. I mean, that's what you have to have. We have no island and formica counters. Picked up a pair of kids shoes at Nordstrom. Double yikes! $150.00. Okay, they were Prada. Who knew? Small guest ain't gettin' none.

No other wisdom gleaned, except the new Roche Brothers still has traffic jams in the produce aisle just like the old store. Nice checkout guy let me into an empty 12 items and only line with approx. 15 items. Hideous mess in the snowy parking lot and I almost took out 2 kids, another car and the guy collecting carts.

Now the snow is coming down pretty good, and we are home. Stopped at Acapulco for a very reasonable and tasty Mexican lunch. $7.99 for a big platter of food. Can't beat that. Generous wine. I think the willows were a little yellower than last time I looked.

Can spring be far behind?


Grapeshot

Getting Published . . . Staying Published . . . Suck It Up

Yesterday Boston writer Kate Flora told it like it is--her quest as a writer to stay published.

http://writersplot.typepad.com/writersplot/2008/02/heres-the-truth.html#trackback

The New Yorker cover was also instructive.

There is not a lot more to say. I have run across agents and editors who are good folks.

The bean counters are the hobnails in the corporate boot. Imagine, accountants controlling what books are printed. I see it now! Stacks and stacks of spread sheets! Taxation manuals, project plans, how to run a corporation from your desk drawer, macros for fun and profit!

I don't know.

Grapeshot

Surgery Without Anesthesia

For the last two weeks, I'm been excising extraneous words from Promiscuous Mode, cutting it from 109,000 words to 105,000. This was after a prior session which had already resulted in cutting 5,000 words.

I find it amazing that one can go back again and again making corrections. I also fixed a bunch of passive sentences, awkward phrasing (how did that get left in there?) and routed out unnecessary sentences, adverbs (especially) and adjectives.

It's hard work, this paring, but the novel is always stronger, better, more readable. A good editor could probably find a few thousand other words. After all, I cut 16,000 words out of World of Mirrors.

Next week, we're travelling to Sleuthfest, in Deerfield Beach, FL, sponsored by the Florida chapter of Mystery Writer's of America. I'm meeting with an editor or an agent and also reading the first pages of Festival Madness to an audience. Tonight I'm practicing on my writer's group and Thursday on my Toastmaster's chapter. Practice makes perfect, etc.

I'm also going to send out another half-dozen queries for PM. This is my last year of crime fiction writing unless something breaks. Then it's on to literary fiction, commercial fiction, women's fiction, whatever. And then to the young adult that is screaming, "write me! write me!"

It's hard to admit failure after pounding away at a project for almost 15 years. 5 books, endless rewrites, queries, groups, meetings and finally rejection. A lot of sucking up, believe me. On the plus side, I have become a decent writer--no one gainsays the competent writing. Seems to be the stories. They're good stories, but they're perhaps a little "thinky" as one instructor noted.

Heaven knows, anyone who programmed computers for as long as I did is bound to be "thinky." That's what computer people are--have to be. Thinky. What a word. What a concept. And mystery readers are people-people and like their stories "Feely."

I tried to make the transition from Thinky-thinky to thinky-feely, but I am not a touchy-feely person. Sorry, can't help it.

It's not that thinkers are unfeeling, but first and foremost, they're thinkers. Vivaldi was a thinker. So was Bach. Thinkers can write thrillers, but I have no interest, and probably less talent in that genre. No ideas, either. So it goes.

Listen, if you need 4,000 words, mostly redundant sentences, adverbs and a few adjectives, I have them for sale cheap.

Grapeshot

Pizza ! Pizza!

Have you noticed the price of groceries goes up every time you step foot into the supermarket? Scary, isn't it? Sometimes I make dinner out of whatever is in the pantry plus a couple of frugal purchases. Today it was pizza. I bought 2 plum tomatoes and a box of sliced mushrooms, (on sale) half of which can be used with another entree.

We had a weird mixture of stuff of hand: a little mozzarella, low-fat ricotta, Parmesan curls and shredded Parmesan, somewhat long-in-the-tooth pepperoni. Frozen dough, although it you make your own if costs pennies, but that is, like, work.

So I arranged everything on top of the dough and stuck the whole business in a very hot oven. Was it good! Better than store-bought. Of course I don't stint on the pepperoni or the mushrooms or even the fresh tomatoes.

You can always make soup out of what is on hand or an omelet, too, assuming you have eggs.

When I was in college for a while a bunch of us would get together to cook a weekend dinner at someone's apartment. We bought a bag of noodles, a couple cans of tuna and some peas. Dinner cost mere cents, which left more money for beer. Students know how to get by.

Sometimes when you have the least money is when you have the most. Think about that.

How many chicken wings is too many? I'll never know.

When I was still in the workforce, occasionally I would have a "hungry day." A hungry day is a day that no matter what or how much you eat you are still hungry, a dieter's nightmare. Yesterday I had one.

Oatmeal for breakfast, no issue there, but as I stood in front of the prepared food counter at Roche Brothers, I thought "eight honey-stung drummies." Usually I get six, and last week seven, trying to determine the amount that might actually be filling.

When we got home it was way past lunch time, always dangerous and I scarfed down the "drummies" with a half-slice of bread, not good. Decided I could have easily eaten nine or ten.

I'm not sure I even have a limit with chicken wings. Well, surely I must have, although it hasn't been found and probably better not be.

Dinner time. S.O.'s birthday dinner. I always make a German-style stuffed cabbage with boiled potatoes and a salad. Picked up some tapioca at the prep-food counter instead of making a cake that two people would devour over the course of the week. Ate the stuffed cabbage, easy on the potatoes, and a nice salad. Waited until later for the tapioca which we ate with a bit of heavy cream.

Sneaked one cookie (homemade oatmeal raisin) and came downstairs to work on Promiscuous Mode and got into the jar of peanuts big time. I mean, there was no reason to get into the peanuts. But I was hungry.

So this morning the scale showed me the extreme error of my ways, from the homemade cookies to the unsalted peanuts and the eight (although small) honey stung drummies. Damn.

Of course there were leftover potatoes which I fried up with slab bacon, onion, tomatoes and eggs for breakfast. Double Damn. By the way, that dish is called "Hoppel-Poppel" and is in my novel, The Shadow Warriors.

I think a long, very long, walk is in order. No matter how cold the wind is blowing. And here's hoping that you don't have a hungry day, or at least not very many. Unless of course, you are skinny and still smoking like a chimney, and then you deserve a whole week of them.

Grapeshot

L'Avventura

One of the good things about Netflix is that one can get old movies that need another viewing. We revisited Antonioni's L'Avventura, (1960). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053619/.

We saw the movie quite a few years after it came out, on a quest to see Fellini and Antonioni and deSica and all the great Italian directors. By the way, don't bother with Stromboli, it was awful. The scandal surrounding the director (Rosselini) and Ingrid Bergman made the movie famous but not good.

Watching L'Avventura, we had flashbacks to Fellini, and even Chinatown (all the windows, doorways and arches) , and Last Year at Marienbad (long hallways). I had remembered the first part of the movie but very little of the second. All the great 60's movies (Chinatown was 1974, but the U.S. was still behind the curve cinema-wise, although The Graduate changed all that).

After watching the movie, we watched it again with the commentary, which of course mentioned some things that we had overlooked or simply not seen. Very interesting.

Monica Vitti looked alternately, like one of my friends from college and also like a Boston writer I know now. I want to see The Red Desert, but Netflix doesn't yet have it.

In the movie, we see a Sicily that doesn't necessarily look like a Sicily from guidebooks, and get to know an aimless, uppercrust society that was unfamiliar to Americans at the time, the idle, amoral rich. Now of course, we are awash with them, all the "celebrities" who do nothing or very little and, well, you know who I mean. There is something about having to go to work every day to survive that keeps one focused.

Being on a cruise aboard a private yacht is . . . how can I say this. . . the open sea and islands mingle with the idea of erotic possibilities. Which of course is what happened in the movie, and La Dolce Vita was omnipresent.

I don't want to give away the plot in case you haven't seen it, but instead of renting Dumb and Dumber or Cheech and Chong (you don't, do you?) pick up L'Avventura or La Dolce Vita, Blow Up, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Knife in the Water, 8 1/2, or any of the Italian or French New Wave directors, or the Angry Young Men in Great Britian, or Darling (Julie Christie). It is not only a mirror back into the 60's or early 70's, but a mirror of our recent history. And as with all mirrors, the image is not usually pretty. L'Avventura did interesting things with mirrors, too. Of course even the Elizabethans were hung up on that.

The more things change . . .

Grapeshot

La Vie en Rose

Look, Ma! No Apron!

Have you noticed the cleavage queens on the food network never wear aprons? My lord, if I cooked without coverage, it would be ugly. The only alternative is to wear old jeans and wipe your hands on the fanny. Can't imagine cooking without a parachute, so to speak. How do they do it? Nothing ever splatters or spills or inconveniently is where it should not be. Like all over you. Of course, aprons are not designed to exhibit cleavage (see above). Don't get me wrong, I love them all, and they cook up a storm, but how do they do it?

Wondering!

We are dining on chicken soup tonight. Nobody is sick, and it's not very romantic but hey, the ingredients were present and accounted for, and it's like a free meal. I've liven it up (well, a little) with biscuits with cheese and chives.

I hope you are all going out for a romantic feed. We think the crowds and the over-crowding and hence poor service don't make for a romantic evening, au contraire. So we'll be slurping the soup (quietly) and then enjoying a movie and maybe even a cognac. And a real wood fire. Now, that's romantic.

In Honor of St. Valentine

I changed my last snarky post. Instead. . . AOL crashed when I submitted my post, and in spite of what blogger promises, it never saves a draft automatically, ever, so you lose everything. Happy Valentine's Day to AOL and Blogger! What a pair. Love and kisses. Sometimes I write the post in Word and once Word crashed and I lost the post.Happy Valentine's Day to all Microsoft products. Love and kisses to all.
Doing your taxes sucks, big time. Love and kisses to form 1040, the accountant, the IRS and Uncle Sam. Hearts and flowers, too!

The Boston weather also sucks. Love and kisses to the New England winter that keeps us indoors so we don't go spending that money the government is sending. Ooops! You spent yours online already? Sorry! Love and kisses to Uncle Sam.

The snow plow came at 4:00 a.m., waking the neighborhood and they could have saved the gas and the energy and sleep because the rains came and washed out all the snow and probably the inky-dinky spider as well. Love and kisses to the snowplow driver, the shovellers and the inky-dinky spider who long as he/she doesn't come into my basement. One of the cats might eat him which is gross beyond words. Love and kisses to the cats who never saw a crumb of food they didn't eat. Love and catnip and tummyrubs all round.

The Year of the Rat dinner was good. We saw "Babel" last night, also good. I cut some words from Promiscuous Mode. Very good.

Love and kisses and happy valentine's day to the writers who settled their strike. This writer was never on strike but felt feelings (felt feelings?) of brotherhood,sisterhood and comradeship to say nothing of solidarity. Experienced feelings! Yes!

Things do even out, most of the time. For some reason, writing never sucks, even when it does.
Write a valentine to someone/someething who is causing you grief. Send love and kisses,

Love and kisses,

Grapeshot

Year of the Rat

Horrible forecast for this evening's weather, and we were supposed to go to the New England Mystery Writer's meeting. The scheduled speaker was a PI, so it disappointing when stuff is cancelled.

I moved up our Chinese New Year dinner. Orange chicken, I think it's called. Every Chinese New Year we celebrate with a home-cooked feast. Always something yummy. I'm also sauteing pea pods and making a salad with the orange that will be left after the rind is used. And rice of course. Basmati, not Chinese, but who cares?

Sometimes we eat with chopsticks. When my kids were little, they would ask what the writing on the chop sticks meant. We always told them, "it says 'shut up and eat,'" which they believed. I suspect that I was not the kind of mother that will ever go down in history as the greatest. Hated car pools, and didn't much like birthday parties, after a bunch of 7 year old boys spent the greater part of the party on the floor wrestling. Having little kids is stressful, and it's 24/7, plus you can't turn off the beeper. Nope.

Back to Chinese food. Article in NY Times (I think) this week about how none of it is authentic, and I have known people to return from China and say the food was awful, so it's hard to know what' to believe, but the best Chinese meal I ever ate was in New York's Chinatown with someone who knows his Asian food and it was totally wonderful.

We have noticed that in Boston you can't get decent egg rolls, whereas every store front in Chicago had them. The worst I ever ate were homemade. One of life's mysteries. But I'm hoping the orange chicken, which I suspect is not authentic will be tasty. Tastes good and not too many calories and doesn't take all day to make is ideal. My aims are modest.

Since I first went to school and ate the school lunches that were usually yucko, I've liked a macaroni casserole made with ground beef, tomatoes and elbow pasta. When we came to Boston, I discovered they called it "American Chop Suey," which I had never heard of, but now it has a name. A pound of ground beef feeds us for 3 nights, and it's tasty with parmesan cheese and some red pepper flakes for zing. Comfort food.

Enough rambling. Time to do some writing. And then it's off to feed the cows before the storm hits. I think they are starting to accept the new young bull that appeared in place of the sweet faced young bull who sired all the current babies. So far he has kind of been taurus-non-grata with them. Cow culture is hard to understand. But isn't that also the case with our own culture?

Alors,

Grapeshot

Carrots are Happiness

While I am on the topic of cooking bringing happiness, let me tell you about the carrots. Organic. $1.99 a bunch. What the hell? Let's do something nice for us.

First of all, the cut-off tops went to the Scottish Highland cattle along with two bags of excellent kitchen scraps: broccoli stems, orange and grapefruit peels, stale bread, yummy (for cows) treats.

Significant Other peeled four. I cut each medium carrot into 3 pieces and cooked them in lightly salted water. Drained, then added a meagre teaspoon of butter.

They were delicious. They redefined succulence. They made me happy. I served them with chicken cutlets in a sauce of shallots, capers and lemon juice, with a bit of chicken broth (homemade) and the fat from the top of the broth divided between the sauce the the rice. Heaven. No waste, just pure nutrition and flavor.

And happiness.

Happiness and Charles Simic

“For starters, learn how to cook.” That’s the advice that poet laureate Charles Simic offered in last week’s Sunday New York Times Magazine (2/3/08) to those who are looking to be happy.

Being happy is a condition that is on many of writer’s minds. Maybe on the GP (General Public’s) mind, too. Today the Times “Style” section about “Modern Love” mused about the notion that only the very young (twenties) and the very old (seventy-plus) are happy, and that middle age is a time of unhappiness. That may be truer today when most people postpone having children and reach middle age with kids at home and aging parents and stale careers and big mortgages and all those worries. Marriage, if you can make it past twenty years, actually improves when the kids leave home. You can be a couple again. If you stayed married and are still speaking. Whatever.

What intrigued me was Simic’s statement that happy people cook. Or maybe are married to a cook. I have to confess that cooking makes me happy. Never thought of it before. Is it nurturing and nourishing others? Dunno. Cooking a lamb chop and some fresh asparagus for moi also makes me happy. Does eating decent food at home make us happy? The ancient idea of gathering around the warm hearth? Something to that effect.

My friend (who does not seem a terribly happy person) and I used to assume cooking duties every summer at an Easthampton house party. The non-cooks were always amazed that we were happy (sic) in the kitchen so many hours a day. We were very happy, almost delerious. Everyone, (almost) contributed. S.O. made his specialty drink, the host whipped up a key lime pie, others chipped in. And we were happy. The hostess was almost never happy and she didn’t cook. Strange, isn’t it. And the broth was never spoiled. Idyllic summer days, now gone.

My grandma sang old hymns in the kitchen while she cooked and did the dishes. She was, I think, happy.

This morning we had the Schaller and Weber bacon and eggs with cherry tomatoes, shallots, mushrooms and chives. Good bread and good jam. And I was happy.

Cooking is a creative act, with manual effort. It engages our mind, our imagination and our hands. Perhaps that makes us happy. “For starters, learn how to cook.”

My protagonist, Emma Lee Spence, likes to cook. Even at Burning Man when she has to deal with picky eaters and primitive facilities, she’s a happy cook. Instinctively.

Treat the cook well. There is an old saying, “she was a good cook, as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went.”

Food for thought.

Go, dumb-born book

With apologies to Ezra Pound and all non-English majors among you.

Most writers make an effort to promote their work, and it’s always hard to know if one is doing a good job or not. The rewards of PR are not always reaped in a timely fashion. Sometimes I “google” myself to see where I am mentioned, a somewhat shameful practice best done in private. Normally I find my web site, blogs, the Crimebake, SinC, MWA and sometimes an old obscure mention that brings a smile to my face.

Last week when I “googled”, I found my novel, The Shadow Warriors, mentioned on a “book wanted” Web site. Hmmm. Since anyone can buy my book on Amazon, I researched the “wanted” site. The listing was posted June of ’06. The wanted list belonged to a member of an organization new to me, called Book Crossing. Members leave and take books all over the world, and record the books’ journeys. O.K., so it’s a little weird, but the membership consists of committed readers, a good thing. http://www.bookcrossing.com/ the world's largest free book club.

I registered myself at Book Crossing, and emailed the woman who was looking for The Shadow Warriors, explaining that I had a lightly used copy and was, in fact, the author. Of course I asked how she happened to hear about my novel, since “Grapeshot”is not a household name, like John Grisham or Janet Evanovich. She answered that her partner is a librarian, who had attended a library conference and come home with a book of women mystery writers. My correspondent likes mysteries by women, and she said she went through the book and noted what sounded interesting and put them on her “wanted “ list at Book Crossing, where my Shadow Warriors listing had languished since 2006.

I remembered the library conference in Boston a couple years ago, and that our SinC (Sisters in Crime) chapter had been a big part of the action. We had a nice color brochure introducing our authors, mostly female, and their books. My supposition is that this little booklet made its way back to Kentucky and to a woman who loves to read mysteries by female writers who put The Shadow Warriors on her “wanted list.” And she finally found it. How cool is that?

The moral of this story is that no PR effort is wasted, and our “dumb born books” go into the arms of readers in ways that we cannot even imagine. And that is a good thing.

Of course we like to readers to buy our books, but more than anything we like for our books to be read, checked out of libraries, passed from hand to hand, read. Otherwise, one is a voice crying in the wilderness.

Go, dumb-born book!

Clothes Horse

Since leaving the work force, I have noticed that my wardrobe needs are simple: jeans and shirts or sweaters, work-out clothes, a couple "decent" outfits and one "good" outfit and one fancy dress and jacket tucked away for a New Year's Eve kind of event.

In spite of the fact that I haven't been a clothes horse since I stopped smoking and left the size sixes of this world to inhabit, shall we say, a roomier size, the closet still contains a fair amount of clothes, so many tops, for example, that I wear some only once or twice a season.

I am actually wondering how long I could survive without buying anything. Would it be six months? A year? Two years? This strikes me as an interesting and a money-saving experiment. Trying to decide if I am up for it. What would be the first garment? Undies? Pajamas? Socks?

Why do we have so many clothes? I have a friend who has so much stuff she'll buy something and not wear it for a few years. Naturally she is not terribly style conscious and wears so-called classic stuff, nothing too trendy. Some women have lots of cheap stuff, some have a few good items and others have whole closets full of clothes.

Did I mention that I still adhere to the seasons approach and in late-April and mid-October perform the seasonal wardrobe swap? A few things span the seasons, like jeans.

Good old jeans! What would we do without them? I am always horrified when I see jeans that aren't really jeans, say, they zip at the side or have the wrong cut. Too weird.

So let's see how long I can resist buying something. Daresay it won't be two years.

Sitting here in new Christmas robe and what passes for pajamas. Do you know what passes for pajamas these day? I refuse to spend $45 and up for "real" pajamas. Kmart has t-shirts for $6, and the Ocean State Job Lot has flannel "lounge pants", read p.m. bottoms for $7.00. Nice ones, too, from J. Crew. Cool pajamas for $13.00 instead of $45? Such a deal. I have also discovered "lounge socks" at Ocean State Job Lot. We ventured in for the cheap jam and saurkraut and came out with the damndest stuff.

Come the recession (is it here yet?), I'll blog money-saving tips, having been through various recessions before. So, stay tuned, as they say.

Grapeshot

Computer Crime Novels Looking for a Home

I’m looking for an agent/publisher for my three novels, all of which deal with computer crime on some level. Non-technical enough for your maiden aunt to enjoy. Bleeding-edge enough for thrill-addicted mainstream readers.


World of Mirrors is a psychological suspense novel set in the chaos that is East Germany in the year after the wall goes down, five years after The Lives of Others. The country is not yet reunited. When American hi-tech guru Zara Gray is blackmailed into hunting down stolen computer secrets, the search leads her to a Baltic island—and a deadly encounter with a sociopath. Her partner in the hunt is old boyfriend TK Drummond, a failed spy with no reason to love her and every reason to betray her. Double-crossed by everyone, Zara and T.K. must rely on a software thief and a North Vietnamese “guest laborer” to sail them to safety as they play a nautical game of cat and mouse through the shipping lanes of the fog-shrouded Baltic. (96,000 words)

Promiscuous Mode, a cozy with an edge,riffs on the the age-old theme, “a stranger comes to town.” First in the Emma Lee Devens computer crime sleuth series. 106,000 words

What do you do if the boss doesn’t know you’ve accepted a new consulting gig to work under cover in the Northwoods and you leave an “I’m outtahere” note for your husband and no note all for your boyfriend and then the guy who just hired you turns up murdered and there is no Plan B? If you’re Emma Lee Devens, you put your head down and drive an old Datsun pickup into DuBois, Wisconsin, determined to get to the bottom of the computer crime that you’ve been hired to solve. You realize the Northwoods aren’t the sylvan retreat you wanted, and you look over your shoulder for the bad guys while snooping around the office in the middle of the night, and trying to get the lay of the land by lunching with “the girls” at the Coffee Pot Café, bass fishing with the bigwigs, and drinking with the locals at Nub’s Pub. You adopt a stray cat because you’re lonely. The stress level skyrockets when your husband and boyfriend turn up importuning you on alternate weekends, a bad guy kidnaps the cat, and another body drops. You ramp up your powers of analysis and deduction to solve the computer crime and to unmask the murderer. You donate the Datsun to charity and trudge home for one of many reconciliations with your impossible husband. And then you’re off again to solve another computer crime and crash into even crazier adventures in Festival Madness. 106,000 words*

Promiscuous mode, in computer related fields, is refers to the practice of putting a small hardware device into a setting so that it passes all traffic it receives to the computer rather than just information specifically addressed to it. In my novel, the term is meaningful on several levels.

Festival Madness, second in the Emma Lee Devens computer crime sleuth series.
103,000 words.
Someone is killing three reformed hackers who share a shameful secret dating to their days at MIT. The first murder occurs at a folk music festival in the Berkshires, the second in Reno at a Burning Man decompression party and the third? The only hacker still standing is Wayne Wendel, master geek and friend of Emma Lee Devens. Emma is determined to save her best friend, but it won’t be easy. Not only does Wayne refuse to confide his secret, but he keeps disappearing. Once Emma tumbles to the murderer, she races to save Wayne from a watery grave in an Adirondack Lake. Will she get there in time?

Big-assed SUVs

At the health club this morning, a giant black SUV without handicap plate or tag had parked it's big ugly ass in one of the reserved handicapped spots. Plenty of other spaces around. Whenever there is a hint or rain or snow, this happens. Drivers make a pact with the devil.

When I came out of the club, same thing happened. A humongous black SUV was pulling into the handicapped space and a "soccer mom" type woman emerged--again not even a pretense of a handicapped plate or a tag. Hell, the vehicle was so obscenely big that a handicapped person wouldn't have been able to get in and out without a lift. Makes you want to "key" the car or at the very least "egg" it.

I do not have a handicap except for a proclivity to do stupid things lately, which we won't go into.

My Fair Lady was wonderful. Sets were charming and clever, actors, singers, dancers, all in top form. Such a nice evening. The Opera House is so rocococo gorgeous. We were there eons ago when the paint was peeling off the ceiling and the stuffing oozed out of the broken down seats. A whole different experience, now.

My next post will be a paragraph about each of my "for sale" books in order that readers (and there are some) will know what I'm am always yammering about.

Off to eat a healthy breakfast.

Grapeshot, not Grapenuts, although sometimes I wonder.

My Fair Lady

Tonight we're going into town in crappy weather to see My Fair Lady at the renovated Opera House. We go to the theater often enough, but it's been years since I've seen a Broadway musical. Have you noticed that the number of revivals far exceeds the new productions, and if you count the new productions that are derivative of other works, e.g. "Wicked", the list of new becomes even shorter. S.O. reread a big of Shaw's Pygmalion, which MFL is based upon, and said it ran fairly true to the Shaw play.

It is true there are only a few plots, and an exceedingly small number of new dramas. I mean, the Greeks stole from the Romans and Shakespeare and the Elizabethans stole from everyone, and so it goes. A new spin on an old plot is always good. Wish I could think of one. Actually, I have thought of two, but haven't developed them beyond the thinking stage. It is the writing stage where the hard work really begins.

Speaking of work, I'm back, hacking away at Promiscuous Mode, cutting even more words. My writing group thought the new beginning sucked. Why I even started writing Crime Fiction is now a mystery to me, since I appear to have so little talent for it. On the other hand, I had little real talent for computer programming and I became very good at it, due to diligence and application. And persistence. Give me a bug and I would find it, no matter how obscure it was or how long it took.

My process now is to try to cut 10 words from every page (more or less), which will decrease the word count by about 4200. I've already brought it down by 4,000 words. I look at each sentence and try to determine if it can be terser, sharper, more finely honed. Well, you get the idea. Do I even need the sentence? I notice that sometimes I will use a "tell" sentence, followed by a "show" sentence, and therefore the "tell" can disappear. On the other hand, I see a part of the story that needs a little bit more development. It always happens. Cut some, add some, and hope the result is still a decrease in the word count.

I wouldn't be so obsessive about this except so many agents have said, "not for me." I never know if the computer crime, the locale, the promiscuous main character, or the story is what turns them off. Time and again I've heard that the writing is good, whatever that means. After five novels, all of them rewritten umpteen times, I have probably written the one million requisite words. Used to be 500,000. What the hell happened there?

Soon, this blog and its sister blog, about Proust, will total 1000 posts. Zowie! If I knew who the 12,000th reader was, I would send him/her a book. I could have written another novel instead of all these posts. Blogging is thinking aloud. Keeps me sane. Well, you know, sort of sane.

Alors, and onward,

Grapeshot

Nevada Nocturne

I've been working on a poem for the past two evenings. I change it whenever I pull it up on my computer.


Nevada Nocturne ©

In Gerlach , Nevada,
In the deep September night,
A slide whistle player tooted along the street
A cheerful sound, whistling in the dark.

Somewhat later, the long freight,
Having crossed the Black Rock Desert,
Raced through, passing the old water tower.
And shaking the single-wide where I slept.

I have always known
Trains racing through the night
Trains running west
Trains vibrating sound, like a tornado.

And I slept again.

Still later, but before dawn
In the hills beyond Gerlach,
The coyotes howled
A lonesome plaintive sound,

And I slept again
Into the September morn,
In Gerlach, Nevada
Soundlessly.

A Waiting Game in Foxborough

Waiting for the game to start, and I may as well confess that I've had frissons of nervousness all week. Bill Bellicek, Tom Brady, et. al. How will it play out? Suspense, conflict, good characters, hey, this sounds like a novel. Maybe that's why it's so interesting. The characters are tough, but are they flawed? Flawed enough? I like their steely determination, the grittiness of it all. We don't usually watch the x+1 hours of pre-game hype. Maybe I'll allow myself an hour. What the hell?

Beautiful weather in the Boston area--they could be playing here today. I took a walk and found perfect football weather--sunny, cool, a bit of a breeze but pleasant.

The bean dip is ready. I mixed some of the bought-by-mistake bean salsa into the real bean dip, and got out the chips. S.O. pronounced it edible. We're going with the chicken and pasta casserole in a mornay sauce with baked crumbs on top. The Domino ad was so cool and showed the Dominos a couple miles from here--we recognized the intersection. Even the pizza looked good, but I usually make my own.

Blueberry pancakes this morning made with sour 2% milk and diet Bisquick, the only diet fare we'll see today. I bought some Schaller and Weber double-smoked bacon--to die for. It's slab bacon, which I had been having trouble finding. Always a good feeling to use up something like soured milk without pouring it down the sink. We put Apricot syrup from the Apricot King (grown in the flavor zone) on the pancakes. Their products are so delicious. http://www.apricotking.com/.

The New York Times Book Review was thick today, and I haven't finished reading it yet, what with walking and cooking and je ne sais quoi. So my analysis will come later this week.

I'm preparing to do the dreaded Tax Workbook the accountant sends us every year. Takes about 6-8 hours to get everything entered. I keep all the receipts together all year, but somehow this is heavy duty paper work which I hate. They don't call it paper work for nothin.'

This week we're venturing forth to the new Opera House to see My Fair Lady. We were in the Opera House years ago when it was literally falling apart, but one could see intimations of the glory days, and now that's it's been rehabbed, I'm curious to see if it captures the former grandeur.

I have to come up with a speech about writing for Toastmasters. I'm thinking of talking about characters and where they come from and how real they become to the author. Should be fun, maybe even edifying.

Yesterday the Globe had an article about all the glitzy parties in Arizona, pre-game parties. Some people don't even go to the game, they just fly down, party and come home before the game. The number of private jets flying into the area is unbelievable. I've been flying into Sky Harbor since there was just one terminal. One always gasps at the huge Valley of the Sun and peers down to see the Camelback, and the plane makes a huge loop and comes in and lands heading East. You can see a gazillion swimming pools, and the baked area of the valley and the green of the city--all that water. In a sense, it always feels like coming home, because I visited there so often over the years. I hope my favorite Mexican Restaurant, Such Is Life, is benefiting from the hoopla. Well, enough for today.

So, let's hear it for the Patriots!

It's Fun to Fondue

It's fun to fondue, or so proclaims an old cookbook. We discovered the ancient fondue pot on a shelf in the basement. Thought I sold it before the last move. So, we said, why not?

Aside from the calories and cholesterol, a reason why not may be the price of things. Holey moley, the cheese cost over $11.00. Add the wine and a decent baguette and it's not a cheap dish. Nonetheless.

I found two unused fondue works in the sideboard, and sterno in the garage with the garden stuff. Don't ask.

It wasn't any work at all. I think fondue maybe even predates the food processor, which makes grating the cheese a whiz. (Pun alert!) We bought a loaf of good bread and in no time at all we had fondue. It's still tasty, kind of cheesey and boozy and yeasty, altogether satisfying.

About a million years ago, Chicago had a restaurant called Geja's that served only fondue. And they had chocolate fondue for dessert and a fondue bourgignon for the people who weren't deeply into cheese. It was a fantastic restaurant, all cozy and fun, and even a million years ago they socked you pretty good for the fondue. But what a place!

If you cook it yourself, the pot is a mess to clean up, so what? Bet I won't be raiding the fridge at ten p.m.

Tomorrow, I'm using the rest of the gruyere in a chicken pasta dish, another non-diet dish. Phooey. Found the bean dip at Stop 'n Stop, just like the lady said. Noticed it didn't expire until late 2009 so I bought two cans. Bring on the Patriots!

Come tomorrow, we'll be ready.

Grapeshot

Bad Habits of 2008 + My Shabby Little Secret

O.K., so I've been working out during the new year, but not one, but two new habits are gaining ground and it's so annoying.

1) TV Watching

2) Eating after dinner

For years, I barely watched anything. Lost? The Wire? American Idol? Never seen nuthin.'
Last summer I began watching the Glen Close legal series on Fox, Damages, and was hooked. Didn't miss a single one. Fox was pushing Nip/Tuck which I always thought was a reality series. Not so. Loved the ads and the music and started watching Nip/Tuck. It's sick, it's vapid, dammit,it's addictive. I've missed a few, but basically I'm now a Nip/Tuck watcher. Love the Jerry David show, Curb Y0ur Enthusiasm --I laugh like an idiot. It's so weird but I identify with him. My shabby little secret.

What else? The food channel. I read that people hated Rachel Ray, so I had to find out why. Watched her program. Hey, they're wrong! She's fun, she's perky, she cooks dinner in half an hour. What's not to like? I love the Barefoot Contessa, the southern lady, practically homemade or whatever it's called, love Emeril, and Gaia. Have you noticed the cleavage and no one ever wears an apron or splashes or splatters or absentmindedly wipes her hands on her butt, forgetting momentarily she isn't wearing jeans? Love the Food Channel. I watch it while ironing or if I feel like lying down for a nap, which thank god, is one bad habit I haven't adopted.

This eating after dinner. I know where it comes from. Comes from eating a #%^^&**diet dinner, and then about 9:30 the munchies arrive. A substantial solid high cal dinner would never do that. You rub your stomach and groan. First I nip into the cookies, just one, then the chocolate, a small piece, then the nuts--way too many. Hell, I should have had mashed potatoes and gravy.

So I am also watching public TV and the History Channel and the last 30 minutes of whatever movie is on--tonight it was Married To the Mob and always a hoot. In short I am becoming an indiscriminate viewer. Like the Miami Crime Scene Investigation. But then I always liked Miami Vice. Vice is good in Miami, not so good in Boston.

The rains came and the thunder just rolled and Annie the Cat took off out her her rocking chair and ran under something. Today is Friday, remember, Cat Blog Day, and so a mention is O.K. Thisbe has been coming into the home office all week, and Annie chases her out.

Still no bean dip at Roche Bros., but I was vocally lamenting lack and a fellow shopper said, "Stop and Stop" has it, and everyone else has stopped carrying it, so I need to get some before The Big Game. Last night I even watched a Super Bowl program on HBO. I mean, really.

Writers will do anything to avoid writing. But I can't believe I'm watching TV. But now I'm writing. Blog doesn't count. Blogging is what we do to avoid the NOVEL. For shame.

Bye