STUFF

by Sheila Connolly

I was planning to write a post about how we accumulate Things in the course of our lives, and then become stymied with what to do with them all.  Then a couple of weeks ago I came upon an article in the New York Times Sunday magazine written by Carina Chocano ('Underneath Every Hoarder Is a Normal Person Waiting to Be Dug out'), and she said many interesting things about hoarding, its history, and our cultural fascination with it.  Plus she said them well, and I'm not going to repeat all her points here.  However, I think she missed two important aspects of Keeping Things.

I live in an 1870 Victorian house, that most people would consider large--you know, twin parlors with sliding doors, nine-foot ceilings, spacious entrance hall with sweeping mahogany staircase.  There's one problem, though:  a dearth of closets.

Or, I should say, a conspicuous absence of clothing closets.  On the ground floor there is a walk-through butler's pantry with a china closet, and in the dining room there is another china closet with a glass front--I guess that was for the "good" stuff.  There is a pantry closet in the kitchen, and I think there was once a second, long since converted into a powder room. 

But clothes?  Ha!  Coat closet?  Nope, only two rows of wall hooks by the back door.  Bedrooms?  One has no closet at all.  Two have very shallow closets flanking the chimney flue (lined with hooks, but not deep enough for a modern hanger), and the last has both a closet and a linen closet.

To put it simply, the storage in this house is lousy.  Or at least, the easily accessed storage.  We have a full basement--damp.  We also have a full attic--which is either freezing or broiling, may have a mold problem, and is not easy to access, especially carrying anything larger than a breadbox. 

I have a lot of stuff, and I've filled every closet, and a lot of the attic.  In my own defense, let me say that it is not stuff that I acquired; mainly I inherited it.  My grandmother, a fiercely independent woman, lived for the last twenty-plus years of her life in an exquisite studio apartment facing Park Avenue in New York.  Everything she owned was encompassed in that room, plus a walk-in closet and a storage closet on another floor.  She chose carefully and cherished each item she kept.

My mother shared her mother's taste, and kept many of the things that my grandmother relinquished.  One of the first purchases my mother made when she married was a matched pair of glass-fronted corner cupboards, to display "nice" pieces.  I still have them (yes, they're full).


And I inherited all of it.  When my mother died, my sister and I divvied up what we wanted, and sold the rest.  There were still two trucks' worth that we carted away.  The furniture was nicer than anything I had managed to acquire by then, so I was happy to have that.  But it's all the other stufff...and I find it almost physically painful to part with something that carries memories.

Someday my daughter (our only child) will inherit most of this stuff.  Much of it won't mean anything to her, since she doesn't have the memories that I do.  How do I pass those on?  What about the collection of demitasse coffee cups that my grandfather--who I never met--collected and enjoyed, as my mother told me on more than on occasion, cradling the cup in her hand?  What about the pink jade Buddha with a removable fan?  I remember playing "hide the fan" in my grandmother's apartment in the 1950s (we always found it, as you can see).  None of these will mean anything to my daughter.  But how can I get rid of them?  I haven't come up with any answers yet, but I pity my daughter in advance.

The other topic that Chocana didn't address is collecting books.  I've always loved books.  I truly believed that our local library was giving me books to keep (so I hid them under my bed).  My grandmother and my mother read books, usually hardcovers.  I had the full set of Nancy Drew before I was ten.  I started on science fiction in college, then shifted to mysteries, and never looked back--and all this was long before I ever thought about writing myself.  My husband and I collected mysteries when we were first married, and inherited more from his father.

So I have thousands of books, and those are only the ones I chose to keep.  I'll admit up front:  there's not enough time left to me to reread all of them, especially if I want to keep reading new books as they come out, and now I have to read the ones that my many writer friends are producing.  And yet...it's painful to part with a book that I love.

How do you handle it?

GOT HIM!

by Sheila Connolly


I was going to post a piece today about stuff and why we hang on it to, but it'll still be there later (just like all my stuff).  Today I awoke to headlines that the notorious, infamous, heinous (fill in adjective of your choice) Whitey Bulger has finally been captured, after being on the run from the FBI since 1995.

To most of the world this is no big thing, I suppose (despite his long presence on the FBI's Most Wanted List, right after Osama bin Laden, and the two million dollar reward on his head), but if you live in the Boston area, his continued absence has been in the news on and off since he disappeared.  Where's Whitey?  Is he dead?  Nope, he's alive and well, and he's been living in California with his long-time girlfriend, Catherine Grieg.

Since Monday of this week it's been all over the network news that the FBI had launched a new strategy, running ads with pictures of both of them during television programs favored by women, in case anyone had seen Catherine (the "moll") at a beauty salon or dentist's office.  Think they'll credit this campaign with the result?  (Probably not, given the timing, but maybe the ad campaign was designed to lull Whitey into a false sense of security.)

Before I say anything more, let me add for the record that I am not connected in any way to John Connolly, the Boston FBI agent who was feeding Whitey information for years, which enabled him to leave town shortly before he was to be arrested in 1995.  Connolly was convicted and did jail time for his role.

I know more than the average person about Whitey and his gang because when I was writing the Glassblowing Mysteries (as Sarah Atwell), my publisher suggested that the villains should be from the Mafia.  Having grown up in New Jersey, I thought the Mafia had been overdone, so I countered with, why not the Irish Mob?  I loved the thought of Boston bad guys trekking around the Arizona desert, completely out of their element.  In preparation for this, I read a couple of books written by some of Whitey's lieutenants (I won't name names, because I think they're all out of prison now--and doing book tours!).  Interesting if scary reading, because the authors were so completely amoral, except when it came to loyalty to their boss.  Even now I can't drive though Southie (Boston's South End, Bulger's power base) without thinking of those stories--and where the bodies were buried.

Whitey's tale also held a delicious irony:  while Whitey was one of the country's most notorious criminals, his brother William was the leader of the Massachusetts Senate, and subsequently president of the University of Massachusetts system (he admitted speaking to his brother just after Whitey blew town, but swore that he hadn't heard from him since).  Nobody has proven that Bill Bulger knew anything about Whitey's whereabouts (or his criminal activities?).

Does fiction get any better than this?  A man who has been credited with at least 20 murders, who ruled the Boston underworld with an iron hand, and then eluded FBI pursuit for years?  With a beautiful blonde companion?

Want to bet that there will be a Whitey Bulger: My Story book in the works in minutes?

How Many Is Too Many?

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I read, back to back, two books that incorporated multiple characters.  I don't mean a handful, but literally dozens of people, who played varying roles in the story.  I thought in one case it worked well; in the other, not so much.  And I've been trying to figure out why.

These are both cozies, by writers who have written other books in the same series.  I've read the other books, and I know and like both authors.  I'm not going to name names, because I'm not promoting or slamming either author.  I just want to come to terms in my own mind why one treatment was more successful than the other.

Cozies by definition take place within a closed community, which means that the villain can't be a stranger who wanders into town and commits a crime, unless that stranger is one of the existing character's Uncle Fred or Aunt Tillie, come back after plastic surgery to reclaim the stolen inheritance.  The rules say there has to be a connection to the town, however obscure, because how else can the protagonist talk to people in town and gather clues? 


What size is a small town?  Two hundred people?  Two thousand?  And how many of those people does the protagonist know by name, or know well enough to call by his or her first name?  I haven't done any scientific analysis, but I'd guess the pool may be, oh, twenty people?  And generally, in a series, these people are introduced gradually, a few per book, and they'll return in future books in the series so the reader can get to know them and remember them.  If you the writer are lucky, your readers will contact you and ask, "when will we see So-and-So again?"  Which tells you that you've created a memorable and likeable character.

So what went right and wrong in the two books I mentioned?  That's what I'm puzzling over. 

--Was the cast of dozens organic and relevant to the plot (i.e., did those people have a reason to be there)?  Yes, in both cases.  In one, it was an unusual situation, but logical; in the other, it was small-town business as usual. 

--Did the characters have enough "face time" for us to get to know them?  Not so clear.  I don't know if there's a standard for word count to establish personality, but in one book the characters distinguished themselves quickly--their own identities, and their relationships to each other. In the other book, there were a lot of people who popped up now and then, and usually the first time they were accompanied by a tag-line explaining them ("Suzie, my former best friend from high school, who had been going through a rough patch with her third husband and was currently living off handouts from her redneck relatives").  The latter smacks of the dreaded "telling, not showing."

I'll be the first to admit that it's not easy to throw in a new character without adding an explanation.  It's a challenge to give them a real personality with only a few lines of dialogue and some brief indications of body language.  Sure, you can use some description occasionally, but if you add it to each new character, it quickly becomes repetitive and throws you right out of the story.

Back in the golden age (whenever that was), mysteries, particularly British ones, used to include casts of characters right up front, along with maps of the small town and diagrams of the manor house where all the action takes place.  The character list was often quite detailed:  "Sophronia Everlast, the maiden aunt of Hector Pumphrey, lord of the manor;" or "Tilly, the second chambermaid for the South Wing."  It seems quaint now, but if you were reading the book intermittently and managed to forget who was who, it was nice to have a reference handy.

I don't think readers' attention span has improved.  Nowadays we're used to quick snapshots of information, and we're often doing two or three things at once.  We're not necessarily as able to focus and concentrate on a book, much less keep track of who's who.

Does that mean we the writers have to dumb down our stories?  Limit the number of cast members?  I hope not.  But we do have to be careful not to overload the cast.  Okay, the shopkeeper down the street is a lovely person, but couldn't that important clue be delivered by someone else we've already met? 

I'd hate to reduce writing in any genre to a formula, but how many characters in a book is too many?

SEX, MONEY AND POLITICS

by Sheila Connolly

It has been said (by the ubiquitous "they") that the best way to keep a relationship, romantic or platonic, on an even keel is to avoid talking about sex, money and politics.  But where's the fun in that?

As a cozy writer, I am not allowed to write about sex, beyond a steamy liplock and a gently closing door.  Likewise, as a cozy writer I don't make a whole lot of money, so I don't have much to say about that.

Which leaves politics.  I confess:  I have worked on several political campaigns in my life, as both a volunteer and as a paid staff member.  This was not based on any deep-seated conviction or philosophy--I just figured I'd better get a first-hand look of something that occupies a major place in our social consciousness.  I'm glad I did, and the experience I gained there has stood me in good stead. 

It would appear that the campaign season has already started, if the television ads, telephone calls and multipart letters are any indication.  Thank goodness for the mute button and the caller ID function, which lets you silence the storm.  But wait!  Isn't the next federal election NEXT YEAR?  All these people are jockeying for position for something that won't happen for eighteen months?

Based on my in-depth experience (note:  in all the campaigns I worked for, my candidate lost), it's easier to watch this process as a big game.  On the one hand we have the incumbent.  Conventional wisdom holds that the incumbent has a distinct advantage, because (a) s/he has name recognition among constitutents, and (b) s/he is ideally situated to raise money, which is the lifeblood of any political campaign.  But pity the poor representative, who, facing a two-year term, must start raising money for the next campaign before s/he is even sworn in.

Then there are the contenders for the opposition, and here's where it is really interesting this year:  they are coming out in droves.  A full spectrum, from conservative to moderate, from highly qualified to absurd.  And they're all out there now, stalking the country, buying chunks of air time, making outrageous statements for benefit of the local newshounds and hoping that a major network will pay attention.  It's like watching a seething pot of stew:  a bubble/candidate rises to the top and then bursts, soon to be followed by another one--a process that ends only when the stew is reduced to sludge or burnt to a crisp.

And this will go on for how long?  Don't get me wrong:  this is our system, and we've got to love it.  Sure, it's unwieldy and darned expensive, but it's what we've got.  Changing it is all but impossible.  I recall writing a thoughtful paper about electoral college reform when I was in college.  I'm coming up on my 40th reunion, and how much has changed in the electoral college?  Nothing.

If you want to haul this discussion back to the literary realm, in my opinion Primary Colors, by Anonymous Joe Klein, best captures the mood within a major campaign.  Voters would like to believe there is a campaign plan in place, and competent people who are executing it.  Uh, not exactly, or not all the time.  But that's what makes it so much fun--the energy, the excitement, the high stakes involved.  In a way it's surprising there are not more good novels about politics, because all the elements are there--sex, money, and politics.  And conflict, and resolution, if not a happily-ever-after ending.  And if you're writing the book, you can speed it up!

[Aren't you glad I didn't talk about Rep. Weiner's weiner?]

Promotion Redux

by Sheila Connolly



I promise I'll stop obsessing about this soon, but with two books coming out in the next two months, promotion is very much on my mind.The following was part of an email I received this week from an organization I subscribe to on line, and the header line included "Learn Essential Marketing Tools."  I was invited to participate in a series of workshops where I would learn how to:

--Develop a branding concept--Develop an overall marketing campaign--Understand and decide what marketing tools (web, print, etc.) best attract customers--Learn how to plan and create the framework for your website--Plan and create a website



All of this sounded very familiar, and I've been hearing it from publishers, agents and colleagues for years.  So why am I repeating it here?  Because this was targeted at farmers.  The email announcement came from SEMAP, the Southeastern Massachusetts Agricultural Partnership.

Yes, the workshops are all about how to market your farm business--just add "for your farm" at the end of each of the above items on the list.

And, believe it or not, this put some things in perspective for me.  Think about it:  electronic media have erased the boundaries between business sectors, and now the same strategies can be applied to mysteries and organic tomatoes.  It's kind of humbling.

But it's also an affirmation of the power of the Internet, if you know how to use it.  Think for a moment of any of the recent examples of civil unrest in various countries.  In an earlier, simpler day, despotic leaders could simply have shut down the radio and television stations and the newspaper (if they didn't already control them outright), and the general population would have had only limited knowledge of what was going on.  Now everyone seems to have a cell phone with Internet access and can post minute-by-minute reports on violence, with pictures and videos.  It's much harder to stifle a revolution these days.

Or in another case, just this past week in South Boston, close to a thousand teenagers congregated at a local beach, and--no surprise, since it was one of the first nice warm days of the year and no doubt more than one illicit substance was involved--violence broke out.  Did all these young people just happen to show up?  No.  They used Twitter and Facebook to draw people to the beach.


And then there's that hapless Congressman who's gotten into hot water about a nude photo that was sent from his Twitter account to someone inappropriate.  I don't know who was guilty of what, but listening to him sputter on camera, it was abundantly clear that he had little understanding of the impact of what had happened. (Bet you have a young aide on your staff who can explain it to you!)


It's an electronic world, and people have become accustomed to instant information.  My Luddite husband can barely dial his cellphone, but last week he spent eight hours driving to a conference with a bunch of colleagues, and any time a question came up, one or another of them would say, "let me look that up on my phone."  This isn't a novelty any more, this is the norm.




What's a writer to do?  We have to embrace ebooks, for one--and that's not easy, because the publishing universe is changing weekly, and even the major publishers are scrambling to keep up, frantically revising contract terms.  But we as individuals can't ignore the potential and the power of the Internet, or we'll be left in the dust.

What is it worth to you?

by Sheila Connolly

I’m a genealogist in my so-called spare time, and recently I realized that while I hadn’t been paying attention, the Registries of Deeds in Massachusetts counties have been busy scanning their deeds (which means that in Plymouth they really do go back to 1620) and uploading them so they can be accessed online.  If you’ve ever done research using the originals, you know how challenging interpreting both the handwriting and the terminology can be, and print-outs used to be very expensive, so you’d spend a lot of time laboriously copying the relevant information and hoping you got it right.


Now you can go to each county and call up the electronic version through an online database.  For the earlier years you need to know the book and page number for the deed(s) you are looking for, but you probably already have that.  So they’re still working on the system—it’s not perfect yet, but for researchers like me it’s a huge step forward.


But (of course there’s a but), all counties do not approach this process in the same way.  I was lucky to strike gold in Hampshire County (where my Orchard Mysteries are set), which will let you read and print out images of the originals for free.  Since I’ve got a lot of ancestors out that way, this was wonderful for me.


But I live in Plymouth County, and I’m curious about the ancestors who lived here, as well as about the history of my house, so I next checked out my county’s system.  Uh-oh, they want money.  I guess they’re assuming that most users are involved in real estate, one way or another, so for them paying $30 a month to access deeds is simply a business expense that gets passed on during a land transaction.  Then I decided to check out Norfolk County, where I had still other relatives (they’re everywhere in this state, believe me).  Gulp:  they want an upfront subscription fee of $100 per year, plus a $1 per page printing fee, also prepaid.  All those lovely images of 18th and 19th century deeds, many of which I’ve never seen personally—how much are they worth to me?  That’s what I have to decide.


And, to get to the point (yes, I do have one), I realized that this is similar to the ebook business these days.  While the numbers of ebooks published, and the range and quantity of ereaders, have both grown exponentially over the past couple of years, the pricing model is still all over the place.  Speaking from my admittedly limited experience, at the high end we have Major Publisher ebooks, which cost the same as the paperback version, or maybe a dollar less.  Not a bargain, unless you (the reader) place an implicit value on instant gratification. 


Then you have a lot of people who are uploading books themselves.  These include well-established authors who happen to have a backlist that is long out of print.  Why not sell them on Amazon and make a little more from them?  In addition, there are established authors who have unpublished manuscripts that are not in the genre that is their bread and butter; now they can upload them themselves and promote them, with or without using a pen name, and make some money there (and we writers hate to waste a book!).  And finally you have the legions of writers who are tired of slogging through the agent-publisher morass and just want to get their book out there so they can tell all their friends and relatives. 


How do you put a price on these books?  That’s a business decision, or a marketing one—and many writers are ill-equipped to deal with pesky realities like that.  If you sell it for 99 cents, are you devaluing your work before it even goes live?  Is it arrogant to price it at the same level as a physical book?  Are you using the book as a teaser, hoping to hook readers and planning to raise the price on later offerings?  Where is the happy medium that allows you to look worthy but not greedy?


Barry Eisler announced to the world a couple of months ago that he was going to eliminate the middlemen and publish himself, although this week he’s cut a deal directly with Amazon’s new mystery imprint (is it an imprint if it’s not, well, printed?).  See how fast things are changing? But Eisler already has a solid group of followers.  At the same time there are plenty of eager authors who are loosing poorly edited and formatted works on the reading world, and doing themselves no favors.  If you paid $7 for a bad book, would you feel cheated?  Would you buy anything else written by that author, or has s/he blown their one and only chance?  Would you feel differently about a bad work if you had paid only 99 cents?


What is a book really worth?

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE PROMOTIONAL SUN

by Sheila Connolly


(Last Friday Blogger ate this post, along with a lot of others.  But it's no less timely this week.)


Thank you, Tony Perrottet.


Who's he, you ask?  I didn't know either, until I read his essay "Building the Brand" in the May 1 New York Times Book Review.  He's a writer with several books to his credit, the most recent of which, The Sinner's Grand Tour, came out this week. If you want more details, see http://www.tonyperrottet.com/


If you're wondering why I'm thanking him, it's because he wrote about promotion.  Now, for those of you who simply enjoy reading and aren't enmired in trying to get a book sold to a publisher and into the hands of as many readers as possible so you can do it all over again, let me tell you that promotion is the bane of our existence.  You think all you have to do is write a good book and people will flock to buy it?  Wrong. 


You write the best book you can, the publisher assembles it in whatever format, then shoves it out into the cold cruel world and tells you, "okay, now go sell it."  They may send out Advance Reader Copies or pay for bookstore placement, but it's up to you the author to drum up attention for the book.  What nobody tells you, when you are nursing that germ of a story and sending it out to agents and editors, is that promotion will eat up half your waking life, if you're lucky enough to sell it.  Personal appearances, at large and small events; bookmarks and postcards; newsletters; blogs; crazy stunts; and, yes, social networks--we are supposed to use them all, all the time.


So where does Tony fit?  In his essay he points out that this is not new.  In fact, the concept of manic promotion goes back to at least the 5th-century BC (yes, you read that right), when the Greek author Herodotus paid for his own book tour (nothing has changed) around the Aegean Sea, and was smart enough to include a stop at the Olympic Games. 


In the 12th century, the cleric Gerald of Wales put together his own book party in Oxford, where he provided his invited guests with room and board, and food and ale, for THREE DAYS, and all they had to do in exchange was listen to him recite from his books.  For three days.  Fair exchange?  (BTW, I've read his book on Ireland:  he hated the place, and all the native inhabitants, and he didn't hide the fact.)


The list goes on, and you might be surprised by some of the examples.  Guy de Maupassant hired a hot-air balloon and inscribed it with the title of his latest short story and sent it flying over Paris.  Colette created a cosmetics line (which flopped); Virginia Wolff did a fashion spread with a magazine editor.  The mystery writer Georges Simenon contracted to write a novel in three days while suspended in a glass cage outside the Moulin Rouge in Paris--with input from the audience (it didn't happen because his sponsor went bankrupt).  Walt Whitman wrote unsigned reviews of his own works (sound familiar?).


Perrottet's prime exemplar is Ernest Hemingway.  Perhaps you think of him as a terse and manly writer.  Would it disappoint you to learn that he shilled for beer ads (Ballantine Ale), Pan Am, and Parker pens?


Those of us who live in the current electronic world can moan "but what about the Internet?" That's a mixed blessing, or do I mean curse?  Using the Internet means that you can reach a lot of people very quickly.  The downside is, it never stops.  You can tweet yourself blue in the face, andTwitter is still there, hungry, waiting.


What works when you're trying to sell a book?  No one really knows.  How much is enough?  Same answer.  But we all keep trying, because we like to write books and we want people to read them.

It Ain't Me, Babe

by guest blogger Julia Williams, bookseller extraordinaire and offspring of Sheila Connolly, for reasons which will shortly become clear.

Hello, internet world! I’m guesting today for my mother, Sheila Connolly, as a broken ankle and general post-conference brain-friedness prevent her from coherent typing. The doctors told her to stay away from keyboards for at least a week, but you know how she is. She continues to claw at the laptop as I write this, attempting to wrest back her sacred blogging duty, but I’ll have none of it. I think she’ll pull through. In the meantime, you’ve got me. You can call me Julie.

In case you hadn’t heard, though I’m guessing you had, this past week saw mystery writers and readers and lovers of all stripes convene for Malice Domestic 23 in sunny Bethesda, Maryland. Actually, I’ve just asked my mother if it was in fact sunny there, and she reports that she didn’t see any windows, just the inside of the conference hotel. So it might have been sunny. I’ll speak with the fact-checking department and get back to you. With the grownups gone off to points south, it was my job to hold down the fort here in Massachusetts, and while I am generally a nervous person where creaky Victorian houses are concerned, I hardly found time to be frightened, between working sixty hours a week and my very important commitments to Monday night pub trivia and constant attention to Bravo reality programming. Besides, any time I wondered what the folks might be up to, I had only to log onto Facebook, where Malice photos soon began popping up in my feed like crocuses on the neighbors’ lawns. There was my mother, chatting variously with Liz Zelvin and Krista Davis (both of whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year at the Virginia Festival of the book — small world!), and snaps here and there of another Facebook friend, the talented and eternally chic Hank Phillippi Ryan. It looks like everyone had a good time! There is something marvelous about writers’ conferences, isn’t there? You never can tell what’s going to happen.

This puts me in mind of the first conference I can recall attending. It wasn’t strictly a conference for writers, but it was an academic event at which thinkers presented their work and looked to foster dialogue within their field of study. I was in my first year of college, and drove down from school with a few other students to meet up with a professor whose history class we were all taking at the time. One morning, our group arrived late from the local bed and breakfast and sat in the back of a large conference room for the first talk of the day. After a long presentation on atrocities in Europe during the past century, we all slumped in our chairs and looked at our shoes as the audience began to file out. A tiny woman in her eighties shuffled up the aisle toward the exit, but stopped when she saw us. She patted my friend on the shoulder, said “Cheer up, dear,” and walked on. We all chuckled, felt the mood lighten a bit, and left for a late breakfast. We only discovered the next day, at the conference’s keynote reading, that the woman had been the great writer and poet Grace Paley.

Which describes perfectly what I love about conferences. You may hardly know what’s happening outside the hotel walls, but the excitement of the conversations and connections going on inside make you forget to care. Be it in Atlanta or Austin or Boston or Bruges, the simple aggregation of creative types in one place with one focus makes for an interesting time. Did you ever put some beetles in a jar when you were a kid, and then shake up the jar to make them fight? No, I didn’t either. That would be cruel. Don’t do that. But you get my point. Conferences are a great time once a year (or twice, or many times, depending on how you feel about travel) to recharge your creative batteries, to get excited about your craft, and, heck why not, schmooze with the writing community over tiny quiches and wine. What did you all get up to at Malice this year, if you went? Do tell.

Thanks for reading, cats and kittens. You’ll get Sheila back next week, I promise. Over and out!

Whatever Happened to Women's Fiction?

by Sheila Connolly


When this blog posts, I expect to be at the Malice Domestic convention in Maryland. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it’s an annual event that brings together several hundred writers and fans to celebrate traditional mysteries. It’s a lot of fun.



If you scan the crowd there, you will quickly see that the majority of attendees are women, both writers and readers. Since women make up a large of percentage of the readers of this genre, that’s not surprising. However, it’s not true of other mystery conferences such as Bouchercon, where you will see a better gender balance in the crowd. Of course, the definition of mystery there is much broader, encompassing thrillers, procedurals, suspense, etc.



The national organization Sisters in Crime, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, in 2010 commissioned a survey evaluating who buys and reads mysteries and why. The analysis showed that 65% of mystery readers are female. Why, then, do male mystery writers make more money and get more reviews? One simple (simplistic?) explanation is that women will read across the spectrum of mystery writers and subgenres, but men read books by women much less frequently than do women (and they’re also less likely to read traditional mysteries).



An article in the Southern Review of Books this month adds to the mix the fact that the publishing world is increasingly dominated by women as editors and publishers, but for all of that, in the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement, reviews of books (all genres) written by men far, far outweigh those of books written by women, sometimes by as much as three to one.



All right, perhaps I’m ranting. Many of us female writers know this, and have known it all along. I started thinking about it again recently because I’ve been reading Meg Wolitzer’s new book, The Uncoupling, published last month. In the story the women of a small New Jersey town all stop sleeping with the men in their lives—and yes, the Greek play Lysistrata plays a role in the book). It’s not a Mystery (although it may be a mystery)—there’s no crime, no blood, no officers of the law poking around. But it felt familiar, and I realized that was because it reminded me of a crop of books that came out in the 1970s—books by Alison Lurie, Gail Godwin, Fay Weldon, Marilyn French and their peers. These were books about relationships and characters—mainly women. Women as wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends (not necessarily in that order). The books were labeled “women’s fiction.”



Somewhere along the line the term acquired negative connotations, although I’m not sure why. But to come full circle, I think I write the kind of mystery I do—call it traditional or cozy or amateur sleuth—because of these books, many of which are still on my bookshelf. In all my books my protagonists are women who happen to solve crimes. They’re smart, they’re independent, and they understand people, and that’s how they unravel murders. At least, that’s what I’m aiming for. And that’s why it’s such a pleasure to go to Malice Domestic, which gathers together lots of intelligent, interesting women who enjoy that kind of book.



One final note: just this week Harvard history professor and author Jill Lepore wrote an article for the New York Times entitled “Poor Jane’s Almanac.” It’s about one of Benjamin Franklin’s many sisters, one who wrote to him regularly, and the one to which he wrote most often—and their letters have survived. A woman who could read in Jane’s 18th-century world was a rarity. Jane Franklin did not lead an easy or happy life, and yet she never stopped reading or writing. Nor do women now, with or without accolades or reviews or recognition. That’s why I wouldn’t miss attending Malice.

World enough and time

by Sheila Connolly

"Had we but world enough and time…"  Andrew Marvell began his poem, To His Coy Mistress, with that line, in the mid-17th century, and while the rest of the poem wanders off happily into ramblings about fleshly love, that first line is lovely, and sticks in my mind (with a lot of other assorted stuff).


But lately, being limited in my mobility, which in turn limits the range of my activities, my take on time has changed. As I’ve said here before, I’ve been doing a lot more reading. The past week I’ve torn though The Dirt on Clean, by Katherine Ashenburg (which I bought when it came out in 2008 and have only just arrived at), and I’ve started Christopher Kimball’s Fannie’s Last Supper, which was published last year.


On the surface these would seem to be very different books, but both have made me consider how people in any culture choose to spend their time. Perhaps “choose” is too limiting a term, because for a long time most people did whatever they had to do to survive, which consisted mainly of hunting or growing food, procreating, and dying early. No doubt there was little discussion about how to best use leisure time—because there wasn’t any.


Ashenburg addresses attitudes toward personal hygiene, and how different cultures perceived cleanliness over history. Indoor plumbing has been around for a long time (the Romans did a pretty good job with that, as did some religious orders like the Cistercians in the Middle Ages), but its perceived importance has fluctuated widely. At times people thought bathing was evil, and changed their clothing rarely. But the pendulum swung and now many people are obsessed with both personal odors and germs. Have you looked at the range of settings on a new washer? It takes a degree in computer science to figure out how to program one for a simple load. And if you’re supposed to treat each kind of fabric, each color, separately—how much time are you spending at it?


Kimball’s book is interesting because the author takes it upon himself to recreate a (high-end) meal based upon the Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking-School Cookbook from 1896. This involved twelve courses, each incredibly elaborate, all cooked on an authentic cast-iron stove. The author, clearly passionate about both cooking and the Victorian era, also includes a wealth of peripheral detail (who knew that Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix existed before 1900?).


Admittedly this event does not represent the way most people in the country approached making a meal; instead it captures a particular moment in urban, upper-middle-class fashion. In this rarified niche, It took well over two hours to consume such a meal, and that was with servants presenting each course and clearing away the detritus from the prior one. More servants operated below stairs, chopping, peeling, simmering, etc., etc., to create individual dishes designed to impress and delight—and to disappear within minutes, to be followed by the cleanup (imagine all those dishes!). It didn’t last, though. Servants became harder and harder to find, so the woman of the house began to assume a greater role in shopping and cooking, and then there were all those wonderful time-saving machines and packaged foods that came along in short order.


But for all of that, domestic service was a way to enter American culture. For a time a lot of cooks and maids were Irish, and that included my father’s mother, two of her sisters, and two of my father’s father’s sisters, all of whom arrived in New York shortly after 1900. The house I live in now, which in 1910 housed five or six unrelated people in addition to the owners, also had a servant who was Irish—her room was in the unheated attic. By 1920 there was no servant.


Modern perceptions of time, particularly “free” time, keep changing. Take reading (please!). These days it is a luxury to sit down and immerse yourself in a book, to lose yourself in an alternate universe or a wealth of factual information, purely for your own pleasure. The recent and continuing evolution of the ebook is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because books are now available instantly, in a form that can be carried anywhere; it’s a curse because readers now snatch minutes here and there to read a paragraph or a page, before we’re interrupted by something else. Children, teenagers, twenty-somethings reduce their lives to 140-character tweets in an endless stream.


Does this change how we read, and how we write books? Will the rising generation have the attention span of a gnat?  Must we as writers make our stories bigger, brighter, faster, just to keep them fresh in an intermittent reader’s mind? There are those who say that we mystery writers must put the body in the first chapter, and add a hook to the end of each chapter, to keep our readers engaged. We’re happy that they’re reading at all, but how must we adapt to keep them reading?

Should Actions Speak Louder than Words?

by Sheila Connolly


As I excavate my way through my multi-year TBR pile, I’ve been sampling a few genres that I don’t read consistently—in this case, suspense and thrillers. Two in particular I happened to read back to back: John Connolly’s The Reapers, and the first two of Barry Eisler’s John Rain series, Rain Fall and Hard Rain (yes, the series that he is famously taking straight to ebook now).




John Connolly’s book is a couple of years old, but it’s a signed copy that I obtained from the author when we signed together at Bouchercon (guess who had the longer line?). No relation that I know of, but I haven’t given up hope.



The Eisler books are “homework,” since he will be one of the Guests of Honor at New England Crime Bake this year, for which I am co-chair (shameless promotion: it’s a great conference!) and I thought I should know something about his work when I interview him.



I think that for both writers, their characters are intriguing, their plots are fast-paced, their settings are drawn with a wealth of pertinent details. There are even moral messages tucked in here and there. But they also share a similarity that startled me: their use of language.



In both cases, I would be happily reading along, caught up in the alternately feverish or ominous story, and I’d come across a metaphor or a description that was so compelling that I had to stop and think about it. Like, “wow, that’s brilliant, and I know exactly what you mean!”


For example, in The Reapers, Connolly writes, “A wind farm occupied the hills to the west, the blades unmoving, like playthings abandoned by the offspring of giants.” If you’ve ever seen a wind farm, you’ll see the aptness of this. (I’m also much enamored of a throwaway line in the same book, “phlegm-colored golf shirts,” because I swear my father had at least one of those.)




Or Eisler’s descriptions of a Japanese city neighborhood, in Hard Rain: “Everywhere were metastasizing telephone lines, riots of electrical wires, laundry hanging from prefabricated apartment windows like tears from idiot eyes,” or, “A solitary vending machine sat slumped on a street corner, its fluorescent light guttering like a dying SOS.”



But is this a good or a bad thing?



Any book is a complex, multi-dimensional matrix of elements: character, plot, pacing, setting. In the case of mysteries, you have to add a puzzle, one that must be resolved by the end of the book in a satisfying way. Picture juggling five balls in the air at the same time, and catching them all at the end. No writer pretends it’s easy, although some make it look easy (curse them!). Often in the case of suspense and thrillers, the language and imagery take a back seat. In most cases that’s appropriate, because the writer wants the reader to be invested in the story, to be pulled along breathlessly--to keep turning the pages!



But still, the right image can capture so much in a few words, and can add depth and color to a character based in his or her perceptions of the world. Such nuggets of gold must be used judiciously and sparingly, lest the writer stray into florid Bulwer-Lytton territory (you know, the “it was a dark and stormy night” guy). You don’t want to read a paragraph-long tribute to the wine-dark polish on the revolver that’s about to kill our narrator, the symmetrical star-flash occasioned by the firing of the cartridge, the arrow-straight flight of the bullet headed for his chest. Because then the tension is gone.



Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote: “I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order.” I read this years ago , and I’ve always remembered it. But how much poetry can a mystery writer afford in his or her book?



I think we need a judicious dash of it now and then. We as writers hope that we’re putting our words in the best order, but we should recognize and salute it when a writer manages to slip in a measured dose of the best words, without sacrificing any other part of the story.



What do you think?

BETRAYAL

by Sheila Connolly


We’ve been together for a long time. Oh, things were a little unsteady at the beginning, when we were just getting to know each other, but we worked through that together. We went along smoothly for years. We did things together, traveled to wonderful places, went hiking, skiing, ice-skating. We enjoyed each other’s company. More important, we trusted each other, and you supported me in whatever I wanted to do. You were always there for me.

Then you betrayed me. I never saw it coming. I thought we understood each other, respected each other. I never asked you to do anything that wasn’t right for you. I accepted your limitations. I believed that you were strong and dependable. I was wrong.

And now I don’t trust you. How can I? My faith is shattered, and I don’t know how to rebuild the trust that I’ve lost. I know, you’re still there, waiting for me. Even I can see you don’t look good—you’ve lost weight, and your skin has lost its color. But you brought it on yourself, letting me down when I needed you. You’re going to have to earn my trust again, one day at a time.

I’m talking about my leg.

Funny how one little accident can make you reconsider a whole lot of things. One minute you’re going about your business; the next, you’re on the floor, wondering what the heck happened.

You get to consider all sorts of unexpected things. Like the sound of a breaking bone. We read thrillers where people pummel each other, accompanied by the snap, crackle, pop, and crunch of breaking bones. Now I have firsthand experience.

You learn interesting details about health care systems, and that’s before you get the bills.

You find out how your body reacts to anesthesia (I’ve had no side effects, even with morphine) and heavy-duty drugs (extremely boring—I fall asleep).

You realize that you’re a lot clumsier and less flexible than you used to be, and you have to readjust your mental image of yourself as lithe and supple (well, that was kind of overdue anyway).

You discover just how many things are difficult to do while balancing on one leg and holding on to something to support yourself with one hand. I’ll leave that to your imagination, but suffice it to say, you reconsider your clothing options. Stretchy is good; elastic is your friend.

You realize how many horror stories there are on the Internet about your particular problem, and you devoutly hope that it’s only the whiners who post.

You realize the garden isn’t going to get planted this year because it’s hard to dig with only one usable leg (I refuse to till the whole patch sitting down!).

You realize how many steps there are in the world, and how hard it is to get up and down them. That includes your own home.

You realize you need to ask for help, and you need to thank people for helping you, even while you resent your lack of independence. Most people are happy to help.

You realized how much worse things could have been. Bones heal, life goes on. Things will go back to normal—won’t they?


Can you win back my trust, dear leg? Only time will tell.

BACK TO THE BOOKS

by Sheila Connolly

If there's any upside to this broken limb, it's that I finally get to catch up on my reading.  It seems odd that a writer doesn't have time to read, but it's true.  I mean reading for my own pleasure.  Over the past couple of years I've read for two contests, and that meant I looked at some or all of a couple of hundred books (and tossed a few at the wall with some choice comments, the kindest of which was, "why is this piece of @#% in print at all?").

And all the while I was collecting books, to read "someday."  Books that other people recommended, books that sounded interesting, books I stumbled over on a shelf in a musty used bookstore somewhere.  Books that I need for research (I have not one but two very useful books on how to raise dairy cattle). Books I might need for research someday.  The end result was that my To Be Read piles (plural) had long since passed three feet high--each.  But now that I'm spending a lot of time sliding around on my bottom half has enabled me to reacquaint myself with all those hopeful, patient acquisitions.

Disaster was narrowly averted when The Break happened.  Of course I had carried enough reading material with me to see me through two very long plane trips, and I planned to acquire more in Ireland--one of my worst fears is to be caught somewhere with nothing to read.  (Sorry, I haven't yet obtained any form of ereader, which under the circumstances would have been very handy.)  Let me tell you, small, crowded bookstores and clumsy crutches don't mix well.  Which explains why I found myself reading Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, something I had successfully avoided since it came out (missed all the movies, too).  But there it was, abandoned by some former occupant of our rented cottage, and what's more, it was nice and fat.  I enjoyed it more than I expected, but then, I couldn't afford not to, since all the other books were a lot skinnier and wouldn't last as long. 

I scraped together enough reading matter to survive the trip, namely by sending my husband into the bookstores with specific instructions.  He came up with some good stuff, including a few Irish writers I requested.  And then we came back.

Now, having received strict instructions to keep all weight off the injured leg for six weeks (arrgghhh), I can't cook, wash dishes, clean house, do laundry, or even go up and down stairs easily--all of which suddenly opened up vast swathes of time to (gasp) read!  Whatever I wanted! Heaven!

Deciding what to read, when you have multiple choices, is always an interesting process.  Am I in the mood for something noirish and grim?  Or something light and fluffy?  Do I really want to read another mystery, or is there something else that appeals?  Funny or intense?  Long or short?

Actually I started with Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.  I've read everything else he's written, and this was getting soooo much media attention, so I bought it and...it languished on the pile.  Suddenly had the time to read it, all whatever-hundred pages of it.  It's easy to describe it as "dysfunctional family" and leave it at that, but that somehow doesn't explain why each and every character is both peculiar and believable and you just can't stop reading.  I think I know at least two of the people.

Then Brunonia Barry's second book The Map of True Places.  I loved The Lace Reader, and I wanted to see if the second one lived up to it.  Pretty close.  Oh, look, another dysfunctional family.  Maybe there's a thread here and I didn't even notice:  I want to read about other people's problems, to distract me from my own?

I'd pre-ordered Sara Henry's new first book, Learning to Swim, and forgotten entirely until it showed up in my mailbox.  That was after the New York Times review appeared (unknown writer!  First book!).  Confession:  Sara and I bonded during a long and convoluted evening at Bouchercon in Baltimore a couple of years ago, and I've been looking forward to the book every since.  It does not disappoint.

I treated myself to The Rope That Strings the Hangman's Bag, since I enjoyed The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.  I think Flavia has become some sort of national reader litmus test:  you either love her or find her wildly improbable.  I love her, and identify with her.

I'm sitting on not one but two John Connolly books, but I want to be in the right mood to read them, because there are some dark corners in his mind.  I've also got two books by Susan Cheever, about Concord and Louisa May Alcott, that I've been hoarding for a special occasion.  Is this the time?

I could go on, but I'm sure you don't want to hear the entire roster of my stacks of books.  But since I've been looking for silver linings, the freedom to read as much as I want is a true luxury, and I'm going to take advantage of it.

What Keeps You Warm?

by Sheila Connolly

Couch-bound as I am with this broken ankle, I’ve been watching a lot of news reports about the cascading crises in Japan and Libya. It’s almost as though the universe has arranged entertainment for me, and I'll even admit to having become a bit ghoulish about it, keeping CNN on in the background constantly, waiting for the next piece of bad news. There have been plenty.

When I was in Ireland, I spent a couple of weeks watching BBC broadcasts (and the occasional RTE Irish broadcast), and I was struck by how sensation-driven American news is in contrast. Here we seem to think that all headlines or leads must end with an exclamation mark. Everything must be the biggest and most horrific example possible--or at least in the last few days. Sad to say, a lot of recent events have met that criterion, to the point that we risk becoming jaded by the constant barrage. No longer are we satisfied by one death, or even ten; now we want thousands, with pictures and human interest stories to follow.

It was my unscientific observation that the US is rarely mentioned on the BBC News abroad. Apparently other countries have different priorities, and are not quite so concerned with Big Events and Breaking News. I will admit I found it refreshing, and it’s appropriately humbling to see that the US is not The Center of The World (and I’m also ashamed of how poorly the US covers events in other countries).

What has been happening in Japan has been horrifying from anyone's perspective. The sequence of events has been disastrous beyond the comprehension of most of us, so much so that our own newscasters seem to dole out updates in an almost deliberate way, as though we can’t handle more than a little at a time. They kindly allowed us time to absorb the staggering details of death and destruction and imminent peril, and only then do they start slipping in longer-range issues. How does a country recover from such widespread destruction? (Irreverently, I always wonder where they dump all the rubble.) How do the morgues handle an influx of bodies beyond anyone's best-laid plans? How do you manage to transport food, water and fuel to more remote areas when the roads are destroyed or blocked? The mechanics of the process, on such a scale, are daunting.

And then there are bigger issues: what is the impact of the stunning paralysis of the world's third-largest economy on other countries? We can't just say "it's Japan's problem," because these days we have a global economy--we're all connected.

It can't happen here, right? Well... Some of us grew up in an era when "nuclear" was a dirty word. Somehow we got past that and began to build nuclear power plants, and now we rely on them for something like 20% of our nation's electric power. Of course, in the face of the structural problems that the Japanese plants have revealed, there are those here who are calling for the reduction or elimination of nuclear power in the US. Note that they don't make it clear how we will replace that power.

I live less than 20 miles from a nuclear power plant in Plymouth, MA--a fact that I conveniently ignore. The main components of the plant were made by General Electric, and it’s the same model and the same age as that failing Japanese plant. Not reassuring, is it? But try to implement an alternative? There’s a plan to install more than a hundred windmills off Cape Cod that’s been fighting an uphill battle through the regulatory agencies in Massachusetts for over a decade now, and it’s been stalled because Cape Cod residents don’t want their pristine seascape views marred.

When I was in Ireland, staying in a cottage high on a hill, surrounded by rolling green fields, I could believe I had stepped back in time—except for the three wind farms I could see from my windows. I’ll admit that selfishly I was troubled by the intrusion, but you have to give the Irish credit: a decade ago they decided to make a major national effort to increase their use of wind energy, and now it accounts for almost 40% at peak times. I salute the effort.


Pretty views don’t keep us warm. But what would you want in your back yard? A wind farm? A nuclear reactor? How close is too close?



Look closely, just left of center:  windmills

The Writer's Mind

by Sheila Connolly

Several years ago my daughter and I saw the play QED, a play by Peter Parnell, Richard Phillips Feynman and Ralph Leighton, at a theater in New York (it was our "thumb our nose at terrorists" gesture, since we'd never been to New York together before 9/11).  It's essentially a one-man play about Richard Feynman, a brilliant and eccentric scientist who throughout the play battles health problems that will eventually kill him.  I have always remembered a line near the end of the play, when the Feynman character says, "Because I want to see what it's like to die.... If I'm going to die, I want to be there when I do!"

This came home to me once again when I damaged my ankle in Ireland (I promise I will stop dithering on about this, but at the moment the ankle and the cast and the whole collection of paraphernalia for getting around are dominating my life):  there was a distinct moment, after the snap-crunch-pop part, when I took a look at the situation (not pretty) and my writer's brain kicked in.  Okay, this is lousy, but...isn't it interesting?  I almost feel as though I should apologize for not being in dire pain.  I did ask more than one health care professional whether the absence of pain was unusual--and whether I should be send prayers to some guardian angel for sparing me.  But for whatever reason, medical or mystical, the blasted thing didn't hurt, so I could manage to be objective.  At least, as objective as one can be while contemplating a body part that has assumed a contrary life of its own.

Point one:  the aforesaid body part is not supposed to be pointing in that direction (that's as much "ick" as I'll give you).  Therefore I deduce that the solution will require more than a band-aid and an aspirin.

Point two:  I am woefully underequipped with emergency contact numbers and knowledge of official procedures for foreign nationals dealing with medical issues in a non-home country.  Point two sub one:  I have a working cell phone, credit cards, and (ta-da!) my health insurance card (which is more than my husband had), so I had the raw materials to proceed.  And, hey, they speak English in Ireland!

Thus began the Great Adventure, with the Writer's Mind clicking away at a high rate.  Maybe to some people it would seem cold, but I have to say, it's a great way to distance yourself from the crisis, which makes it much easier to deal with.

Somewhere there are people who would collapse into a gooey pile of misery and rant against the unfairness of the universe.  Why me?  they wail.  I have no answer to that, but I am not one of them.  It's useful to know that I don't fall apart in a crisis (aha, more good writing fodder).  Instead I set about solving the problems as they arose.  First, how to get up the stairs and into the car so I can get to the clinic?  Easy:  Husband, drive you the car as close to the door as possible, and I'll slide on my well-padded derriere (okay, lost a little dignity there, but there was no one around to see).  Where to find help?  Husband, I saw a pharmacy at the head of the main square:  go you there and ask for assistance.  And so on.

Like writing a book, scene by scene.  Break down the problem into manageable pieces, and work through them one at a time.  Forget what you think should happen, or the way it would be back home; deal with what comes.  Pay attention to details, not because they're necessarily important, but because they're a useful distraction, and they can fill much of the endless time you spend waiting for the next step to occur.  What do the nurses wear different colored scrubs?  What kind of x-ray equipment do they use?  Ooh, I like those upside-down watches the nurses had pinned to their tops, where they were easy to see and didn't get lost or tangled up in something else. 

The Writer Brain listened to fragments of conversation around me.  The young woman who had been assaulted the night before, and was there with her mother and additional relatives to have a broken finger looked at.  The many victims of sports injuries (have you ever watched a rugby match?  Brutal!), including one who was clearly in shock even to my uneducated eye, and it was no surprise that the triage nurse moved him to the front of the queue.  The older people, brought in by their children, who clearly didn't understand what was happening, couldn't remember the last meds they'd taken, or even the day of the week.  All real and true--and all material for something, sometime.

After we came back home, I told my husband about the Feynman quote, but he didn't get it (and he's a scientist).  But for me it spoke volumes about a deep curiosity about all things.  If you have to die, don't you want to know what it's like?  Would you want to miss the last great act of your life?  If you're a writer, I doubt it.  I know it helped me manage the situation.

You've been very patient, so I'll leave you with a happy picture (while I had two working feet!) from Dublin.  That's me with Molly Malone, aka The Tart with the Cart.

I promise that next week I'll talk about something else, like natural catastrophes.

AM I THERE YET?

by Sheila Connolly

By now I should be v...e...r...y m...e...l...l...o...w.  After all, I've just come back from a wonderful vacation, touring the ruined homes of my Irish forefathers (and mothers), wallowing in views of field and sea, talking to various sheep (who delight in strolling across the lane in front of your rental car) and cattle.  Jet lag?  Piffle--we're too hung up on time anyway.

That was the way I opened the draft blog post I neatly scripted before I left.  Uh, small problem:  the mellow part didn't quite happen because I managed to trip over a step that I didn't see and broke my ankle in two places (all sympathy gratefully accepted, as well as instructions on how to use those bleeping crutches).  So I spent three days learning the intimate details of Irish health care.  To be fair, the hospital staff was delightful and supportive, the place was scrupulously clean.  The problem was:  too few hospitals (the one I was in serves a substantial portion of the southwest part of the country), and too few beds in those.  The largest bottleneck was waiting for a bed--any bed, anywhere--to open up so we could move forward with treatment.

But this was a working vacation, not a sightseeing jaunt, and nothing was wasted.  As I may have mentioned, I'll be writing a new Irish-based series, whose first book will appear in 2012. My reason for making this trip was to listen to people--both how they talk, and what they say.  I hadn't been here for over ten years--time for the Celtic Tiger to be born and die.  Over here (yes, I'm still here, for the next 36 hours or so), it's as though they took all the financial issues that have beset the US and compressed them into a much shorter time period, except the Irish banks wer in much worse shape.

So sitting in waiting rooms (note:  at least on a weekday, the emergency room was notably free of gore, violence and barfing), or parked on a gurney in the hallway, or in the six-person ward I finally ended up in, I could listen, and I could talk to people.  I met a nice couple who live in a Gaelteacht, where Irish is the predominant language; I listened to a lovely grandmother talk about her football favorites.  Once I broke out (basically I said, put a cast on it and I'll deal with it all later), I talked to people in pubs and restaurants--a cast (or "plaster" as they call it here) is a great conversation-starter.  It fascinated one small girl, who looked exactly like you'd want a small Irish girl to look, including the lovely red hair.  I was gifted with a free night at the wonderful cottage we rented, which sits high atop a hill with wonderful views on all sides--and the land on which it sits once belonged to a Connolly--and  iit was barely a mile from where my grandfather was born. 

No way was I going to let a little  thing like a broken ankle send me home.

Would my readers know if I never spent any time here? I hope so.  As a writer you're supposed to notice details--the ones that capture the spirit of a thing or a place, and let you communicate it with the fewest possible words and still snag the imagination of your reader. If I slapped together some stereotypes and called it "Irish," I'd be insulting the people here and shortchanging my readers.  This isn't Disneyworld East with shamrocks (although the Disney family did originate in Ireland), this is a place populated by real people, who happen to be very welcoming.  Plus you keep stumbling over Neolithic stone circles and ruined medieval castles. 
Don't worry--once I make it back I'll give you all the pretty pictures and such.  And I've already got in mind a short story set in the emergency room...

PACING YOURSELF

by Sheila Connolly


By now I should be feeling very mellow, and I'll still have almost a week to enjoy in Ireland.  Since, as I said last week, I'm not sure about what Internet connections I may have, I'm writing and posting these ahead.  I choose to believe that it is a benevolent universe and I will be having a wonderful time and not thinking about all the things I left waiting for me on my desk.


As I mentioned last time, the pace of things in Ireland is (or was, the last time I looked) simply different. Case in point: I was staying in a bed and breakfast last time with a lovely young couple who were musicians from Texas. They were scheduled for a radio interview in Cork City, about an hour away, and they were running late--and being American, they were anxious.  The landlady said, "sure and they'll wait for you, won't they?  You're the show, after all."


As writers we worry a lot about pacing. As mystery writers there are those who insist that we have to have a body in the first chapter and introduce all the major characters immediately, which is not always easy. Then if we get past that, we have to worry about building suspense gradually, taking two steps forward and one step back. Once at a writers conference I saw a visual representation of this:  the suspense is a straight line with an upward slope, but your story is an oscillating line that winds itself over and under the first line.


I'm not going to compare American, English and Irish writers and their use of pacing--I simply haven't read broadly enough (although I'll try to correct some of that). But I might suggest that we American writers are a bit more rushed.  And I blame television.
My generation was the first for whom television was a significant presence in our lives, and that applied to a higher degree to children, who don't know enough about the world to judge critically. For a time there was a concern that watching violent television shows--like all those westerns with people shooting each other--would make us more violent.  Maybe that idea was debunked when our most vocal representatives became hippies and tried to stop a war. Anyway, I can safely say that I am anything but violent.


But back in the day, shows were rigidly structured with commercial breaks every fifteen minutes. The result was that you had four discrete segments for any one-hour show (the longer ones were mostly dramas, as I remember), and you had to have a crescendo, a cliff-hanger, right before the commercial, so your audience wouldn't wander away looking for a sandwich and never come back. I could probably draw a picture of that too, if I were so inspired.


It's not the same any more. For one thing, there are more frequent commercials (and longer commercial breaks), at slightly more erratic intervals, so it's harder to build to a mini-climax. The final segment is now reduced to ten minutes maximum, and sometimes I'm watching a show and know the ending is going to be rushed because that's just not long enough to wrap up all the loose ends.


It has been a slow and subtle evolution, that kind of sneaked up on us. You recognize it when you see reruns of older shows, because you become aware of the fade-to-black moment that signalled the commercial in the old days, and there's a peculiar flatness when the next scene shows up immediately.  In addition, the new commercials are often thrown in awkwardly, with no regard to the plot. It's hard to stay engaged in the story, although luckily we're probably watching the old shows because we've seen them before.


Why are we as Americans in such a hurry? It's not a new phenomenon. As a genealogist I've long been aware that we are an impatient people.  Our earliest ancestors settled in a new world, and within a generation they began to feel crowded and started moving westward.  And they did it again, and again. Luckily we have a large country, and it took a while until they hit the Pacific Ocean and ran out of room. But that restlessness, that urgency, has been part of who we are for a long time.


Does that spill over to our writing style? Are we capable of enjoying a story that evolves slowly, one where we can get to know the characters? Or must we have action, action, action immediately?  Bang, you're dead--and you have 223 pages to figure out whodunnit and why?


Did I mention that Ireland has a very low murder rate? The local police may wonder why this strange American is asking them odd questions, but I hope they'll have the time to answer.

WEB WITHDRAWAL

by Sheila Connolly


If all goes as planned, when you read this I will be in County Cork, Ireland, where my grandfather was born, doing research for a new and yet unnamed mystery series.  I shrewdly set most of the series in a small pub in a small town, so much of this research will consist of sitting in pubs and listening to people talk--how they sound, and what they talk about.  I hope some of them will even talk to me, and if I've very lucky, I'll persuade a pub owner to show me how things work (like how to pull a proper pint of Guinness).


But the problem with traveling these days is keeping in touch with the cyberworld.  I'll be gone for two weeks, and in that time my email inbox will fill to overflowing, and my provider will send me nasty messages and simply jettison anything else that comes in.  Not good.


I remember the first time I left the country.  I was all of 21, and my mother was convinced she'd never see me again.  She made me promise to send her a telegram from the airport to let her know I'd landed safely.  I did, but the country's telegraph workers were on strike at the time, so she got the telegram a couple of weeks later.  (I was a starving student, so placing a phone call was out of the question.)

Fast forward a decade or two, and the Internet had blossomed everywhere.  The trick was to find a place with a terminal you could afford.  I tend to travel to out-of-the-way places, so I can't rely on the generosity of large hotels.  As a result, I have logged on to machines in places like a converted 18th-century gaol (Ireland again) and a couple of public libraries.  About the same time, disposable cell phones made their debut, so you could pick one up in the airport and at least be able to communicate within a country (no, my own won't work in Ireland--I did check).  I gather now that finding a working pay phone anywhere in the world is becoming increasingly unlikely--everyone has a cell phone.  Guess what:  I've "rented" a cell phone from my regular provider, and I don't even have to change the number (which is good because heaven help me if I have to remember one more number for anything).


But that's still not Internet access.  Why does it matter?  Recently one of my colleagues on this blog described how we get an endorphin rush from receiving emails.  Maybe we used to get the same feeling from a personal letter--remember those?--but emails are constant and immediate. We're hooked. 


As writers we follow a lot of loops and blogs.  As a baseline we use them for support--we writers are often solitary souls, and we need someone out there who understands and who will assure us that we aren't crazy, and we'll work out that plot point and make that deadline, and some wonderful publisher will have faith in you and buy it.  And so on.  The problem is, there are a lot of writers, and they're all needy.  So that means a lot of emails, even if you're on digest.


I'll be gone two weeks.  How will I survive without my daily, even hourly, dose of emails?  What important events and announcements will I miss?  Will anyone miss me?  Trust me, I've already checked out the free WiFi location closest to where I'm staying (which is a charming cottage with views, a hot tub, DVD player--but no Internet!), and plan to have some long lunches in their restaurant, trying to keep ahead of the rising tide.


But this is as close to a vacation as I've come in the past five years.  For my husband (who has graciously agreed to accompany me), it's been even longer. We're looking forward to some down time. I've been to Ireland more than once, and I know that the pace of things is simply slower there.  In my experience, outside of the cities it's a very soothing place, perfect for restoring mental equilibrium and regaining a more balanced perspective.


And I'll come back to a thousand emails.  But maybe by then I won't care.


How long can you survive without the Internet?

BORDERS FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY

By Sheila Connolly


This week Borders officially filed for bankruptcy, to no one’s great surprise, claiming debts well in access of a billion dollars and owing money to a lot of publishers. They plan to close 200 of their 642 stores. Lo, how the mighty are fallen!

As both writers and readers, we live in interesting times. When I was young (in another millennium), my mother and my grandmother were avid readers, although they leaned toward historical fiction, mainly featuring royalty. But there were always books around the house, including a few that I probably wasn't meant to find, much less read.


My grandmother, widowed and keeping company with a gentleman friend, regarded a stroll to Doubleday's in Manhattan as a pleasant after-dinner excursion, and usually came home with a new hardcover, which she was likely to pass on to my mother. In the suburbs, we made occasional forays to Brentano's at the shiny new mall that opened up in the 1960s. As a less satisfying alternative, the all-purpose store in the middle of town that sold primarily gifts and cards and candy and newspapers, had a couple of racks of paperbacks, right up front in the store. When I was in middle school, Scholastic Books would show up every few weeks and set up racks of books, most of which cost about thirty-five cents, and I still have some of them. So there were always books in my life.


Now we're living in the midst of an electronic revolution, watching the shift from physical books to digital ones. Kindle, Nook and their brethren are multiplying like mushrooms, and their share of the market is growing by leaps and bounds. Publishers are struggling to revise contracts to include language that reflects what they know right now and what they think might happen over the life of the contract. Writers are taking back electronic rights and posting their own books, both out-of-print and never-published, as digital books, and reaping the benefits directly.



We've seen closings of long-treasured and well-respected independent bookstores over the last couple of years, because the owners just couldn't afford to stay open. And now we're seeing the implosion of the giants. Is there any business model for selling books that works? I know I wouldn't want to be a bookseller now, no matter how much I love books.


I have an unusual perspective, because my daughter works at a place that bills itself as the largest independent bookstore in New England. It's a great place, with thousands and thousands of books on shelve 10 feet high, and I'm there a lot. But it's been run by the same family since its founding over 50 years ago, and the current generation just isn't that interested any more. They want to sell the store--but what they're selling is the stock, the name, and the goodwill. The family wants to hold on to ownership of the land and the building (in a prime location), although they would offer any buyer advantageous rates for a long-term lease. It's been on the market since last fall, but so far no takers. Will there be? Should there be? How do you place a value on goodwill in this day and age? They had a sale over the past couple of weeks, and the sizeable parking lot was filled with people jockeying for any open spacesBbut I've also been there on days when it was all but empty. They have a loyal following and great name recognitionBbut is that enough to keep the store in business?



At the same time, libraries are struggling to hold a small slice of municipal budgets, cutting staff, hours, and acquisitions. How can we stand to lose both bookstores and libraries?



Any reader among you knows that reading is an addiction. We can't survive without words in front of us. I've been known to read decades-old magazines I found stuffed under chair cushions in rustic vacation cottages when all else failed. Cereal boxes. Operating manuals. We need our fix, and we need it regularly.



Are pixels on a screen the same? They're still the same words, put together by the same people, only in a form that is infinitely more portable and adjustable. And you'll never run out of books, as long as you're near a computer or a wireless connection. All that is good. But what we lose is the serendipity of browsing: the pleasure of wandering through well-stocked aisles, picking up whatever appeals to us for any number of reasons, leafing through the pages, and deciding to give it a try. Will that change how we all read?



Will Borders survive? It’s not clear at the moment. But its woes have sent a seismic ripple through the publishing and reading world.  Where will you turn for your books now?