This is My Tribe

by Sofie Kelly (aka Darlene Ryan)
Author of the Magical Cats Mysteries


Writers work alone. We create worlds. We kill. We make love spark and desire simmer. We live, much of the time, in a make-believe world with people who don’t exist outside of our heads and our laptops, and the real people in our lives shake their heads and wonder if we’re deluded. Or delusional.

But for the last week I’ve been taking an online writing workshop, and I’ve been surrounded by a community that doesn’t think it’s odd to talk out loud about imaginary people. Or to them. No one asks, “Why don’t you write something like Twilight?” 

Several years ago I sat with another group of writers and heard poet and novelist Sue Goyette say, “We are your tribe. We understand.”

I have found my tribe again in an electronic gathering of like-minded people. In our online class we get giddy over a plot twist or a well-crafted paragraph. We throw ideas at one another, posts crossing in the ether until a suggestion becomes a few words from one person, a few from someone else. “Turn the princess into a vampire witch on a quest to find Elvis in the lost city of Atlantis.”

“Send me your address, I found that book we were talking about yesterday,” someone emails. No one ever complains, “Mom, we have no toilet paper again.”

Writers write and when we aren’t writing, some part of us is always watching, always plotting, no matter what’s happening to us or around us. No matter how sad, how silly, how bizarre, a little voice in our heads is thinking, How can I use this? We are crows. We see shiny pieces of other people’s lives and we reach for them. In our real lives we hear, “Don’t put this in a book.” In class a dozen people type, “You have to write about this.”

This is my tribe. People who sit too long at stop signs searching for the right words to describe a sliver of crescent moon that seems to be teetering on a roof edge. People who fall on a patch of sidewalk ice and ask the paramedic for a pencil and a piece of paper to scribble down the sensations.

In the real world this past week, dust bunnies have met, courted and spawned babies. In the real world there are enough crumbs under the kitchen table to make a sandwich. And in a few more days we’ll be ready to go back to the real world, to hunt down the dust bunnies and sweep up the crumbs. We’re part of the tribe now and we’ll take that sense of community, of encouragement back to the real world. Because the real world is where all the stories begin. Stories about love, hate, despair and what really happened to a dozen double rolls of toilet paper.

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Sofie Kelly is the pseudonym of young adult writer and mixed-media artist, Darlene Ryan. Her first Magical Cats Mystery, Curiosity Thrilled the Cat, landed on the N.Y. Times bestseller list. Sofie/Darlene lives on the east coast with her husband and daughter. In her spare time she practices Wu style tai chi and likes to prowl around thrift stores. And she admits to having a small crush on Matt Lauer. Visit her website at www.sofiekelly.com.

Say Cheese--The Photographer, Tess Gerritsen and Me

(Although I've been a guest here before, this is the first of my regular posts. Sandy, Lonnie, Sharon, Liz and Julia have invited me to join Poe's Deadly Daughters on a regular basis. (Thanks, guys!) I'll be here the first weekend of each month. I'm taking a break from writing for teens and working on an adult mystery and I'll be sharing some of my experiences along the way.)

I should start by saying I hate having my picture taken. Not dislike. Hate. Loathe. Despise. I blame that on the development of Kodak’s Brownie camera. Simple camera—in theory. Basically, it was a brown, box shaped camera with a lens, a viewfinder, and film. It was so simple anyone could use it, and did. So if it wasn’t my mother lining us grubby faced kids in a row somewhere and telling us, “Say cheese,” it was someone else’s Mom. And we’d smile…and smile…and smile while she moved us “a little to the left,” or “just a bit to the right,” or “a couple of steps closer,” until by the time the picture was taken those smiles looked nothing like smiles. In fact generally we’d look like a row of miniature Cesar Romero’s doing the Joker on the Batman TV series. (Yes, I know Jack Nicholson also played the Joker, but I grew up in the 60’s.) Overall, I’m just a little paranoid about having my picture taken. But it was time for a new author photo, so I decided that not only was I going to have a new photo, I was going to have a “famous author” photo, the kind of picture that would make me look like I was a cosmopolitan world traveler instead of someone who read Cosmo in the check-out line at Wal-mart. I was going to have an author photo like Tess Gerritsen. Okay, so Tess is of Chinese ancestry and I’m not, but my daughter is. And Tess is American and I’m Canadian, but she lives in Maine which is close to Canada. And she’s a New York Times best-selling author and I’m not. (Yet.) But I read the New York Times. (Sometimes.) Overall, if you squint a little, there’s not that much difference between us. My friend, Kevin, who is a photographer, agrees to take the pictures. I considered letting Mr. Wonderful take them, but when he takes pictures the subjects always look like they were standing in Saskatchewan—which would be fine with me, but according to my publisher in an author photo people should actually be able to see my face. Tess, I discover, has two author photos on her website and she looks elegant and worldly in both of them. My favorite is on her blog. She’s in a white shirt, smiling with her arms crossed over her chest. I can do that. Problem # 1: I can’t get my hair to hang like hers does. I don’t have that much hair. I briefly fantasize about extensions. Since I live down the road from the middle of nowhere, the only supplementary hair I can find is at the dollar store. It’s very black and very curly, and when I hold it up to my head I flash back to the summer when I was eight and my mother decided to give my stick straight hair just a “slight wave” with the help of a Toni home perm kit. I spent the summer looking like Michael Jackson’s illegitimate white-bread sister. Stick me in a pair of bell bottoms and a paisley shirt and I could have been grooving in between Tito and Jermaine. Okay, so the hair is out. I can still do everything else. I have a white shirt, a designer shirt. Well, it’s designer in the sense that I bought it at the mall as opposed to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. I find the shirt at the back of the closet and put it on. And remember why I never wear the thing. Problem # 2: The blouse zippers instead of closing with buttons, and that zipper bulges out in the front so I look as though I have a third boob right between the real girls and about twice their size. No white shirt either. I go back to Tess’s website and study her picture again. The woman has no wrinkles, I notice. Would it be in bad taste to post a comment on her blog asking what kind of wrinkle cream she uses? I decide if I can’t copy her hair and her shirt I can copy her confident woman of the world pose. Anyway, if you squint a little, there’s really not that much difference between us. In the meantime I stick some green painter’s tape across the wrinkles between my eyebrows in the hope that they somehow flatten out before Kevin arrives to start taking pictures. (Don’t bother trying it. It doesn’t work.) Kevin arrives with some nifty gadgets in his camera bag including a filter he claims will make me look as though I’ve been lit like Barbara Streisand. He suggests I wear my pink shirt because the color will look good next to my face. Since the shirt makes me look skinny I agree. I pose for shots inside. I pose for shots outside. I fold my arms, smile and think, “New York Times best-seller list.” Kevin takes the film to be developed. Problem # 3: I look like an after model in an osteoporosis commercial. Or Quasimodo in the bell tower. If they were both lit like Barbara Streisand. “I want to look like a famous author,” I wail to Mr. Wonderful. “I think you look beautiful just the way you are,” he says, kissing the top of my head. “Let’s go take some shots in the park,” Kevin suggests. The sun comes out. Kevin poses me, arms propped on the low stone wall surrounding one of the artesian wells in the park. I smile and think, “Please don’t let my arms be in bird poop.” The finished photos look very good—no elegant shirt or cosmopolitan pose. Just me, looking like me. I go back to Tess Gerritsen’s blog for one more look at the famous author photo. I hold my picture next to the computer monitor and take a minute to read the blog. Tess went to Turkey on vacation. I’m going to Wal-mart to find something that gets out bird poop. Other than that if you squint a little, there’s not that much difference between the two of us.

Do Blondes Have More Fans?

Darlene Ryan (Guest Blogger)

Once upon a time, in a past life, I was a late night disk jockey. Back in the early 80s, tuned in to the right place on the dial, you would have heard my semi-sexy voice in between songs from the Rolling Stones and Air Supply. I even had my own fan club of sorts. Yes, my fans were mostly guys. Yes, most of them had a thing for my voice and definite ideas about how I looked. And they were almost always disappointed when they finally saw me in person. You see, it seems that on the radio, I sounded like a tall blonde. That's right, blonde. And, apparently, I also sounded… endowed.

In reality I'm a short brunette and my best friend calls me “chest-ly challenged”. Still, it never failed. We'd be out doing a public appearance, and at least one man would come up to me and say, “But I thought you were blonde,” in a voice that was a mix of annoyance and disappointment. And he’d never be looking at my face when he said it.

I learned a lot of things working in radio. I learned an amazing number of swear words. I saw how men act and think when it comes to women. (I worked with seven guys.) I even learned a few things about music. I could give you a list of one-hit wonders. I could tell you more than you probably want to know about the Rolling Stones. And I learned that you're never going to make everyone happy. Some days you're not going to make anyone happy. (Not everyone likes Air Supply.)

The same thing applies to writing, I’ve discovered. You can't write a book that's going to make everyone happy. In fact, I don't think you should try. But there are a few things I think a writer does owe her readers--her fans:

1. A well constructed book. That means proper spelling, good punctuation, and a story that has a beginning, middle, and end.

2. A story that respects its genre. Romances have happy endings. Murder mysteries have bodies and killers. No, that doesn't mean Cinderella has to marry a prince. She can marry the stable boy as long as she's happy in the end. And that killer? Maybe he's performing a public service. He doesn’t have to end up dead or in prison.

3. No lame tricks to save the day. No “deus ex machina.” No what I like to call, “God in a helicopter.” The heroine can’t suddenly get her memory back, remember she was a contortionist in the circus and turn herself into a human pretzel to get out of the ropes. Thirty-two chapters later, the detective can't suddenly get the significance of the clue on page 15, but not tell anyone.

4. A story that makes sense. In real life people do things for stupid reasons or no reasons at all. But you’d better come up with credible motivation if you want someone to stick around for three hundred pages of your book. And it doesn't really matter if you tell your story from one point of view or six different points of view, as long as readers know whose head they're in.

On the other side, there are a few things we don't owe our fans:

1. A prequel, a sequel, or the next book in a series. (Yes, I know a lot of editors aren't going to agree with me. And by the way, if Tim Cockey is reading this, this doesn't apply to you. Come on, would it be that hard to write one more Hitchcock Sewell novel?)

2. Another mystery. (Or romance, or thriller, or what ever.) You do owe readers your best work, but you don't owe them the same work every time.

3. Another book at all. Yes, I know all about building a career and a reader base. But maybe you want to try a screenplay or poetry or a picture book.

Write the book that excites you. Tell the story you want to tell. Give your readers a good book, your best book. Blonde hair and big endowments are strictly optional.

Darlene Ryan is the author of Rules for Life and Saving Grace.

Tied Up in Research

Darlene Ryan (Guest Blogger)

I hate research. I don't mean the kind that involves curling up with a stack of books for the afternoon. I mean the kind of research that involves me doing something. That kind of research never quite works out for me. A couple of weeks ago I was trying to solve an ongoing problem with my WIP. I had my main character tied to a chair. Would she be able to throw herself sideways? Could she do it without hitting her head? There was no way I could figure out the problem on paper. That meant.... (gag, gag) research.

"Honey, could you tie me up later?” I asked my husband.

"What will you be wearing?" Mr. Romantic asked with a leer. "Will there be whipped cream involved?"

Men.

I went out to the shed to look for rope. There was none. There were more bicycles than we have people in the house, as well as four rakes—which is very strange because there are never any rakes when it’s time to gather up the leaves every fall. Then I remembered, when I'd moved a chair for my mom I'd had to tie the trunk up with a plastic skipping rope, because we had nothing else.

So where was all the rope? There had been a length of white nylon rope hanging up by the snow scoop. Then I remembered I’d kind of set that on fire. (For future reference, it's not a good idea to try to melt the end of a fraying piece of rope if it may have been at one time tied to the handle of a gas can.)

We’d had some yellow rope. Where was that? Oh right, that had ended up all unraveled when I cut a piece to tie to the sled because I wasn't going to try that melt the end of the rope with a match trick again. No sirree.

At one time we did actually have some “real” rope. Hemp. Cotton. Sisal. I didn't know what it had been made of. It was the kind of rope you use to practice tying knots when you’re learning about sailing, when what you’d really rather be doing is planning how you’re going to sail to the Bahamas, live on the boat and write a best-seller a year. Oh yeah. I'd used that rope to tie up a couple of boxes of books before the school yard sale last year--with perfect reef knots, by the way.

Okay, so I couldn't get tied up until I got some rope. It was off to the big-box hardware store. At the hardware store there was an entire aisle of rope and chain, all on big cardboard and metal rolls. A nice young man with a pierced lower lip was happy to cut me a length. What did I want? And how much?

What did I want? I wanted rope. Who knew there were so many kinds of rope? I looked up and down the aisle as though I were contemplating my options.

"What do you need the rope for?" Pierced-lip asked.

You see, this is why I hate research. I can’t tell Pierced-lip that I need rope because I'm planning on getting my husband to tie me up. Oh, no. First of all, I'm old enough to be Pierced-lip’s mother. Yes, I know I don’t want rope for some kind of kinky middle-aged sex thing. But he doesn’t know that. And second of all, I learned the perils of giving away too much information the time I was looking for a new toilet in the same store. When the sales guy asked me what kind of toilet I was looking for I blurted, "The one with the biggest hole." (It's not that funny. At the time I had a four-year-old who used half a roll of paper with every bathroom visit. Each flush was an adventure. And by the way plunging is great for firming up that pesky little underarm flap that keeps on waving even after you've stopped.)

So I said, "I want to tie up a rug."

"You shouldn't tie a rug with rope," he told me. "You could damage the pile, ma'am."

Great. I have to get the only keener in the entire store. However, using my quick writer-ly thinking, I said, "It's a really old rug."

"It could be an antique, ma'am," he said. "You definitely shouldn't tie that with a rope."

"No, no," I insisted. “It's only an old rug I need to get rid of. I just want to roll it up and tie it on my car."

"You have roof racks?” he asked.

Roof racks? I just wanted some rope. Why were we talking about roof racks? "No,” I said.

"You know you shouldn’t just tie things to the roof of your car," he said. "It's not really safe. And I think it's against the law anyway."

By that point all I wanted to do was tie one end of a piece of rope to that lip ring and the other to the bumper of my car and drive away very fast. I had a headache that felt like someone had just driven a spike through my left eye. “Never mind," I said, heading for the door.

"Roof racks are in aisle 14," he called after me.

When I got home, Mr. Romantic was in the kitchen practicing knots with the tie backs from the kitchen curtains. "Is the guy in your book a sailor?" he called after me as I headed down the basement stairs. "Because I think he should be." I just kept on going.

I hate research.

Darlene Ryan is the author of the novel Saving Grace and the hilarious Rules for Life.