Edith Maxwell's pouring poison

Catriona writes: It's lovely to be welcoming the woman I know as Edith Maxwell back to the blog today. Writing as Maddie Day, she's bringing out the third in a series of cozy wine-country mysteries set near where I live in California - in fact Edith came to visit while on her research trip pre-book one. Before I hand over, I want to say a big congratulations. Book three - you've got a trilogy. It's a thing now!  

Edith writes: Thanks for inviting me back to Criminal Minds, Catriona! I’m delighted to hang out here for a pre-celebration of A Poisonous Pour, the third Cece Barton mystery, which releases next Tuesday.

As this is the Criminal Minds blog, I’ve been thinking about the criminal mind. Describing a mind that way makes it sound like the brains of certain people are inherently criminal. But are they?

 I found an article in the American Psychological Assocation Monitor that points to an answer of Yes. People with a history of aggression and violence seem to have a smaller amygdala and one that functions differently. Toddlers who don’t react with fear to a fearful stimulus can be shown to have a higher incidence of crime later in life. (The good news is that the brain can be changed with appropriate approaches.)

I’m an author who mostly writes into the headlights, pulling apart the misty curtains as I go along discovering the story. That means I usually start with the victim and then pay attention as several plausible suspects make themselves known.

 Most of us, when confronted with a nasty or difficult or devious person, do not resort to murder. In my stories, I try to explore what would push someone over the edge to actually kill that person.

 In this book, we see that Regan Greene is definitely a difficult person at the vintage car show and wine tasting event when the book opens. Cece Barton, who brings her blue 1966 Mustang convertible as well as wine from Vino y Vida, the wine bar she owns, has a prime seat from which to observes the various entanglements Greene gets into.

No surprise, Greene ends up dead. A local artist worked as an admin for Greene and had plenty of conflict with her. The new hardware store owner had a past with Greene as well as new verbal tussles. Even the mayor of my northern California fictional Colinas has a run-in with the victim. And then there’s Cece’s elderly neighbor, Richard, who is a former journalist. He wrote an expose of Greene’s work at the district association, and the police seem to be interested in discovering if he went further than the article.

 

Which among these has the true criminal mind? Mind you, I don’t know anything about these characters’ amygdalas (and I don’t really want to, although I might explore that in a future book). One of them committed the homicide, though.

 Readers: Who’s your favorite fictional criminal? I’ll send a commenter a copy of the new book after I get my box of author copies.

Catriona adds: I'm glad it's just us, because we think that is a perfectly normal question and we all know we'll have a long list of answers! So's not to steal thunder, I'm gonig to leave my answer until the end of the day.

At the Memorial Day weekend classic car show and wine tasting, northern California wine bar owner Cece Barton witnesses heated discussions with local vintage car owners and overbearing association director Regan Greene. After Regan is later murdered, Cece once again enlists her twin, Allie, as her partner-in-sleuthing to clear the name of Cece’s elderly but muckraking neighbor. But they’ll have to act quickly to investigate various suspects in the case before the trail goes sour.

 

Maddie Day writes the Cece Barton Mysteries and other gentle and historical mysteries; as Edith Maxwell, she writes Agatha-Award nominated short crime fiction. She’s a member of Mystery Writers of America and a proud lifetime member of Sisters in Crime. Maxwell/Day lives north of Boston with her beau and their cat Martin, where she writes, cooks, gardens, and wastes time on Facebook. Find her at edithmaxwell.com and at Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen.

Marianne Dreams, Catriona Screams

What stories scared you to death when you were a kid? Or even as an adult. Did you learn anything about storytelling from that?

It’s Eric’s day, but he was too chicken to write about this. Juuuuuust  kidding. I’ve got a guest  tomorrow (Edith Maxwell / Maddie Day – it’s going to be a great post) but I’ve also got a book coming out next week and this topic is perfect for it and for me. Hm, the two things might not be unrelated.

Links and details here

In The Dead Room, newly widowed Lindsay Hale (née Lord) comes home to the house where she grew up and where her brother still lives, and gets lost all over again in what the cover-copy writer called “the thickening mist at the end of memory lane”. Isn’t that great?

The Lord family home is a bungalow inside the gates of a scrapyard – Lord’s Will Provide! – where Lindsay and John spent a childhood making pirate ships out of garden sheds and time machines out of dentists’ chairs. Until John grew up and turned to his own secret places where Lindsay wasn’t part of the plan.

People often ask if I am my protagonists, if my heroines are me. Here’s a bit of proof that I’m not. John’s den, for him and his big boy friends, is a place he calls “The Barrens”, a name Lindsay doesn’t understand. Lord’s Yard is anything but barren! It’s stuffed to the gunwhales.

As John knows though (me too and Angela on Monday as well), “The Barrens” is a reference to a notorious spot in Stephen King’s fictional Maine town of Derry, where kids hang out who shouldn’t, where things happen that definitely shouldn’t. Lindsay has never read about it.

But I bet a lot of us have. Because so many of us read Stephen King at what someone recently – who was that? – called “exactly the right age. Which is ‘far too young’.” I was one of them. Danny Glick at the upstairs window? Yeek. And Neil and I still share a look if poor old Rachel, who’s nearly twenty, attempts a jump and muffs it.

On my laptop where she believes she belongs

But that was enjoyable terror. After Pet Sematary and Salem’s Lot, I went straight to The Stand, The Shining and the rest. I read the end of Dumas Key, all alone in my isolated Scottish farmhouse, during a powercut, by the light of a guttering candle. It was only when I closed the book, looked around and thought about going upstairs to bed, with the shadows leaping at me, that I reconsidered my choices. If memory serves, I phoned my mum.

But long before that there was a book that served me true terror, no enjoyment involved. It’s a kids’ book called Marianne Dreams, and searching for the jacket on Wikipedia yesterday gave me the absolute willies all over again.

Why? Marianne is a wee girl who’s ill in bed, amusing herself by drawing sketches of houses and people and trees and dogs, all the usual things. The trouble comes when she falls asleep, which is when the sketches – sprung to life – are waiting for her. She can walk in and out of the jagged, pencil doorways and talk to the stick-figure strangers. When she wakes up and scores through her drawings, all that happens in the next dream is that the people are stuck in the house, trapped behind those scored lines and screaming for help.

That book scared me for years. In fact, decades later, in that same farmhouse on a Scottish hillside but thankfully not alone this time, I saw a trailer for the film they made out of it and had a full-on panic attack.

Why? Well, I managed to go to sleep every night between the ages of five and fifteen only because I believed, tried to believe, worked at believing, that all scary things were imaginary and couldn’t do any real harm. Marianne Dreams, joining nightmares and waking reality with those thick, deep, pencil lines, threatened to destroy a very precarious, although functional, system.

And did I learn anything about storytelling? Oh, you know, this and that. Nothing that helps with Dandy Gilver or Lexy Campbell. But the standalones? Where all those women face down demons and triumph in the end? Or at least gain peace, purpose and found-family? What are they but me insisting that the scary things are imaginary – after all I imagine them – and so they’re powerless. I’m in charge now. I love watching all these women find their way through the Barrens and out the other side, before I send them off into their futures.

I hope anyone who goes back to the scrapyard to vanquish demons when The Dead Room comes out next Friday enjoys this latest journey too.

Cx 

Read 'EM and Learn by Eric Beetner

 What stories scared you to death when you were a kid? Or even as an adult. Did you learn anything about storytelling from that?

At the risk of being cliche, I borrowed my sister’s copy of Skeleton Crew by Stephen King and a few of those stories- The Monkey, Survivor Type, The Raft - scared me to the core. One summer I checked Jaws out of the library and remember that one scaring me, but also being struck by the “adult” nature of some scenes. Not in a violent or sex-filled way, but I remember one passage about Brody going to the bathroom hit me hard as something I knew was a private moment and I wasn’t sure I should be reading that about someone. These people were very real to me, not mere fictional characters on a page. I wanted to respect their privacy.

I read the requisite other King novels like The Shining and Carrie. I started watching an unhealthy amount of horror films and reading horror books, though mostly in short story form. I think horror works best in small doses like that. 

My takeaway from recognizing scares worked better for me in shorter stories was that suspense has a limit. You can stretch the rubber band taut only so far until it breaks. Tension needs to rise and fall. There need to be moments of release along the way. Trying to build suspense over the course of a 300 page novel is impossible. That became apparent early on and I use it every time I try to build suspense in a story, even though I’m not writing horror.

The unknown also stood out as the scariest thing. The best, most effective tales never explained too much. They didn’t show the monsters or feel a need to explain why certain mysterious forces were at play.

The unexplained force in The Raft would have lost its power if we knew exactly what and why. The reasons why The Monkey wants those people dead isn’t the point, and it’s more frightening when we don’t know.

I don’t read nearly as many scary books these days, but the ones that work on me often work for the same reasons. Sara Gran’s Come Closer terrified me and it is the sense of the main character’s loss of control that dominates that story. She knows something is wrong but doesn’t know why. Even when she realizes exactly what is happening to her, the why is never explained and it makes the whole thing so scary.

In life the lack of a why drives most of our anxiety. It can cripple us with fear. Of course it would work on the page.

Sometimes the simple act of confronting death would do a number on me. I don’t know if it was fear, exactly, but the trauma that I felt after reading Where The Red Fern Grows deeply scarred me, and many in my generation. There is a reason why in my latest trilogy I did NOT kill off the dog. I absolutely learned the power of depicting loss in a novel. Making us care for a character - even an animal - or creating a bond between two characters means that if we put the readers through a loss then you can create a lasting impression, though it might not be the one you want if it becomes a scar they carry with them for the rest of their lives.

When a writer goes to more extreme measures with violence or gore, and I’m thinking of someone like Joe R. Lansdale who writes some very effective horror stories that don’t shy away from spilling some blood, then it touches on a different part of our internally held fear. Just being forced to imagine such horrific images and scenarios can strike fear into us. Lansdale knows the difference between shock and suspense. He delights in shocking us, but those shocks only last a fleeting amount of time. Building longer, more sustained suspense creates a contrast and a counterpoint to the moments of shock. 

Fear remains one of the most impactful feelings authors can instill in a reader. Harder, in many ways, than even the notoriously difficult to elicit laughter. 

If there is a lesson here or a profound truth, it is that anytime of writing can offer a takeaway. There are thing other be learned from anything we read, regardless of genre. 

The Blue Fairy Effect

  

What stories scared you to death when you were a kid? Or even as an adult. Did you learn anything about storytelling from that?

 

I didn’t grow up afraid of ghosts or monsters, at least not the usual ones. Vampires seemed impractical. Werewolves felt like a scheduling issue. No, what unsettled me as a kid was a puppet.

Not the sanitized, cheerful version most people remember, but the original wooden troublemaker from Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, the one accompanied by illustrations from a fever dream. This was a world where consequences arrived swiftly. At one point, Pinocchio is hanged from a tree. The cricket, no gentle companion, meets a similarly abrupt end. And the Blue Fairy, ostensibly a figure of guidance, radiated something I didn’t yet have language for: not quite menace, but something colder, more unknowable.

When Pinocchio first meets her, he asks what she’s doing alone in that empty house. She tells him she’s waiting for the undertakers. This is the guide. This is the voice of moral instruction. In the original text, she’s not simply “blue” but a child corpse with turquoise hair—la Bambina dai Capelli Turchini—a detail that feels very wrong.

Years later, I would stumble across the word unheimlich, often linked to Kafka, usually translated as “the uncanny,” and feel a small, belated sense of vindication. The feeling that something is both familiar and deeply wrong at the same time. A puppet who wants to be a boy. A fairy who helps, but on terms you don’t understand. A moral universe that doesn’t reassure so much as it judges.

If Pinocchio was my introduction to existential dread, the Grimm Brothers made sure it stuck. Their stories didn’t warn; they punished.

The film The Sixth Sense works the same way as Pinocchio for me. The first time you watch it, you’re following a story. The second time, the signs were always there, but you needed initiation to see them.

The Shining (film) didn’t get under my skin because of the ghosts in the hotel. In the book, though—it was those topiary animals. Shrubbery should not move. And yet there they were, inching closer and closer.

The Exorcist made me wary of darkened bedrooms and fog in the night. Phantasm introduced me to the idea that a simple metallic sphere could hunt you down. Now we live in a world of drones and constant surveillance. Turns out the nightmare wasn’t so far-fetched.

Looking back, what strikes me is that none of these stories relied solely on shock. What stayed with me, what worked, was the slow erosion of normalcy—the sense that the rules had shifted just slightly, but enough to make everything feel off-balance.

And that, I think, is what I carried into my own writing.

I don’t write supernatural horror. My work lives somewhere between crime and spy fiction, where I’ve always been drawn to reversing the order of expectation. It’s the one avenue of writing that I feel is truest to life and experience, independent of culture, gender, historical period, and social class. My villains have a code. The allegedly “good guys” are bent. Nothing new there; Donald E. Westlake and other writers have mined this vein for years, and it mirrors something truer than we like to admit. Justice is a commodity, a social construct. It’s evasive. Dependent on who tells the story and who’s left standing at the end.

Like life, the friend today is the enemy tomorrow, and yesterday’s enemy is today’s ally.

As for the uncanny—psychological tension, at its core, is about dissonance. It’s the Blue Fairy effect: the realization that the guide was never entirely trustworthy, and that the signs were always there—you just didn’t know how to read them yet.

Dissonance happens if you’re living life on your terms and not just following the algorithm of expectation and conformity.

If there’s a craft takeaway here, it’s this: the most enduring scares aren’t the loudest or the most graphic. I seldom write graphic violence because real violence is fast, almost indifferent in its efficiency. The shock comes after.

A writer can do the same thing without spilling a drop of blood. Tilt the page. Shift the rules. Let the reader feel, if only for a moment, that something familiar has gone subtly, irreversibly wrong.

The guide is part of the maze.

Boo!

 

What stories scared you to death when you were a kid? Or even as an adult. Did you learn anything about storytelling from that?

 

When I was a young girl, probably too young, the first books I read and fell in love with were a series of gothic romances by a woman name Katheryn Kimbrough. These stories followed the women of a high society family named Phenwick. At ten-years-old, the stories were creepy enough to stay with me forty plus years later, but not scary enough to make me sleep with the lights on. That honor was reserved for a little story named It by the incomparable Stephen King, and didn’t happen until I was well into my twenties.

Before reading this story, I didn’t think a written story could scare me. Boy was I wrong. For months after reading It, the lights in any room with a drain had to be on and door closed at bedtime. Even so, it was the only time in my life that I did not appreciate an on-suite bathroom. As soon as I closed my eyes, I could feel that evil clown coming for me. Terrifying. Should I mention what Thinner did to my love of pie? Never mind, that’s a story for another day.

The discovery that fear could actually be created through words increased my love of reading and made me a Stephen King fan for life. I didn’t know at the time how words on paper could spark feelings of fear, excitement, or nervousness. And if you asked me today how to do it, I don’t know if I could explain in succinctly enough to teach someone, but I believe it’s the hardest most necessary skill to have when writing a thriller or mystery.

Unlike In horror movies, or even thrillers, where the eyes and ears do a lot of the heavy lifting for the storytelling by way of jump scares or gory deaths, us writers have to, or are lucky to have, far less obvious choices The description of a house, a person, or even the weather are great opportunities to start building the tension needed to induce fear in the reader.

 But the best thing I learned from my love of reading scary things is, it’s the building of the character is the most important piece of writing scary. If you can build a character that the reader loves, then that emotion will follow, be it love, hate, or even fear.  I loved those kids wandering around the Barrens. So, when they laughed, so did I. When they cried, so did I. When they were afraid, I was terrified.

 

 

Not Dreaming the Dream by Faye Snowden

Deceptively simple, this question broke my brain:

 How did you picture the life of a writer when you first dreamt of becoming one? Did you romanticize your dream? Or were you pragmatic and realistic about it? Compare your dream to the reality. 

I struggled because I never gave much thought to how my life would look like as a writer. I’m trying hard to picture that now, and I can’t. The wheels stop turning in my head and my brain shorts out. Maybe it’s because intuitively I’ve always been a writer? I don’t know. Let’s leave that up to the therapists.

When I first started writing, being a writer was not an identity I ever thought about. Instead I was focused on the act of writing. Think verb, not noun. My dream was about working to write my identity and experiences as an African American woman into the larger but single narrative of TV shows, books, and film. I’ve talked about this before, and explained it best in a Writer’s Digest article I wrote in 2022. Here’s an excerpt:

“When I was growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, scriptwriters and some of my favorite authors appeared to not care about knowing or doing better when including African American characters in books or on TV shows. When these characters were included, they played mostly bit parts, shucked and jived as sidekicks, or mirrored stereotypes that to this day exhaust me. Being disappeared or misrepresented creates real psychological pain and trauma. Not seeing myself reflected in the stories of this country made me question if I belonged in this country. To make matters worse, while reading books by my favorite authors I would often encounter text that caused further isolation. Sometimes it would be a small, throwaway line, or an entire premise that spoke to a shared experience between author and reader— an experience that didn’t include Black people. Maybe something like, When our ancestors came to this country to escape religious persecution, or Women in America received the right to vote in 1920.

Books and television were an escape from both racism and poverty when I was young. The problem was that the very media I was using to survive was in its own way killing me. I would find myself daydreaming entire plots of The Wild, Wild West. In my version a kick-ass Black woman would best Captain James West using physical dexterity, cunning, and intelligence. And she definitely would not be the kind of woman who would surrender with a soul-sucking kiss at the end of the show.”

Eventually, however, I started to write original pieces for sheer pleasure. I’d write on anything and at odd times. At home, I’d might pen a vignette just before dinner on a piece of torn notebook paper. At work, I’d type a couple of paragraphs on a word processor only to exit without saving.  During this time, I don’t think I thought of myself as a writer or imagined what it would be like to be one. I just wrote because it was a thing I did.

It wasn’t until grad school that I started to imagine what it would be like to claim the writer job title. The fact that there were published authors in my family tempered my expectations about the life of a writer. Let me put it this way, no one was driving Bentleys. I already knew writing wouldn’t make me rich, but I did hope that my work would be read. I stopped crumpling up the notebook paper with my writing and throwing them away. I saved the MS Word files with my vignettes to my desktop. With the latest book in my Killing series released on April 14^th I do hope that I will fully realize my dream of being read. How will the results measure up? It’s still evolving. Stick around. Maybe we can learn together.

 

 

LOOKING FOR THE ONE PLACE ON EARTH WHERE AI AND ADS CAN’T FOLLOW YOU? From Jonelle Patrick

This week, the wonderfully talented Jonelle Patrick is posting in my place. Her latest novel, The Samurai’s Octopus, is out next week, April 21. It’s a truly remarkable book, one that surprised and charmed me at every turn of the page. With humor, subtlety, and deep understanding, Jonelle paints the enthralling world of eighteenth-century Japan and the lives of the oiran (courtesans), their wealthy patrons, and the pleasure district of Yoshiwara. It’s an enchanting, fascinating journey. The Samurai’s Octopus is one of the most memorable books I’ve read in years. You’re in for a treat. 

Jim

Here’s Jonelle.

LOOKING FOR THE ONE PLACE ON EARTH WHERE AI AND ADS CAN’T FOLLOW YOU?

You settle into your plush seats at the theater with your bucket of popcorn, ready to relax and enjoy the…ads? Waiting them out, you check your phone to see who won the playoffs, but you accidentally click on the wrong tiny X while stabbing at the screen to close a pop-up window, and suddenly your news feed is hair loss remedies as far as the eye can see. You give up and decide to search for somewhere to eat after the show, but ads keep intruding, touting pricey bars and restaurants suspiciously close to the theater. It’s like the Servers-That-Be know exactly where you are.

 

If it seems like AI and ads bombard us everywhere we go now, you’re not wrong. And if you’re desperate to escape it, you’re not alone. But there’s one place they’ll never catch up with us.

In a book.

And the best kind of book for blocking out the noise takes us far, far, away from our current reality. Traveling is the closest most of us will ever get to being a child again—encountering sights we’ve never seen before, words we’ve never heard before, food we’ve never eaten before—but not many of us can just pack up and go when modern life tips over into Too Much.

 

A great page-turner isn’t just a thrifty way to see the world, it takes us somewhere entirely new without enduring a long flight in veal pen class. It drops you into a different world while instantly conveying insider status, even if you’ve never been there before.

 

I’m talking about books like James Ziskin’s Bombay Monsoon. If that one hasn’t made it to the top of your TBR pile yet, I envy you, because you can still look forward to the pleasure of experiencing the real India through the eyes of his characters, whose virtues and vices are colored by a culture that’s both surprising and familiar. This tale plays out in many of the postcard places people travel halfway around the world to see, but it brings India to life so vibrantly that you don’t just see it, you can taste it and smell it and feel like you’ve seen that chapati vendor on the corner somewhere before.

 

 

Because the author didn’t just go to India and take notes—did you know James Ziskin lived there for years? Neither did I, until about halfway through the book, when I noticed that the details he casually tosses off like he has a million more where those came from are the kind of things only someone who has lived in a country would know. The red-orange streaks on the walls are from men spitting the paan they’ve been chewing, and a mark of luxury living is that the lights are incandescent instead of fluorescent. He knows exactly which private club a successful Indian man of a certain class would be invited to join, and that it’s furnished with a unique piece of furniture with a very…provocative…name. He captures the uncomfortable dance that westerners do around the servants that even the poorest of them must employ, and understands that when you live far from home, you are thrown together with other strangers in a strange land, and can end up with some very strange bedfellows. Including a few who might be spies, human traffickers, or worse.

 

 

But why read a book written by an outsider who lives in a foreign land instead of a native who was born there? The short answer is, you should read both. Why? Let me tell you a story.

 

I’ve never been to India (except in books) but I’ve lived in Japan for so long that the government finally gave in and issued me a cultural visa to stay here indefinitely and write about it.

 

A few years ago, I was working with a Japanese rakugo artist to translate the most famous traditional stories into English. (Rakugo is the art of traditional Japanese storytelling, where an actor kneels on stage and plays all the parts, with only a fan and hand towel as props.)

 

He says to me, “Okay, here’s how the next scene goes.” He stops in front of the house where the scene will take place and says, “Ah. I see everyone is already here,” then opens the door and…

 

“Wait, wait, wait,” I say. “Shouldn’t you open the door first, then say that thing about everybody already being there?”

 

“No, didn’t you see?” Puzzled look. “First I looked down, saw everyone’s shoes were already outside, then I said the line and…”

 

Did you catch that? Neither did I. I had to explain that the scene would make no sense to a foreign audience unless we found a way to remind them that in Japan, nobody wears their shoes inside. (Which is, by the way, why so many bestselling Japanese authors’ mystery books fall flat in translation. Foreign readers are baffled at how the detective could suddenly be so sure that the murderer is just on the other side of that locked door. X-ray vision? ESP? Divine visitation?)

 

If the author was once an outsider themselves, though, they’ve already surfed that learning curve and can tell the story in a way that clues readers into the cultural nuances while making them feel like they already understand them.

 

I hope I’ve persuaded you to take a break from being chased by apps and ads and escape into one of our books instead. As authors who write about our far-away homes in a way that invites you to share their delights more deeply than a mere vacation can deliver, we promise to take you on a technology-escaping ride in the best possible way.

 

 

Jonelle Patrick’s new mystery, The Samurai’s Octopus, is set in Japan’s Yoshiwara pleasure quarter in the 1780s, where the shogun rules with an iron fist, but women hold all the cards. It’s a place where those with the most power must beg favor from those with the least, and one resourceful girl growing up at the House of Treasures just might bring down a high-ranking murderer if she manages to find the mother she’s never known. The next time you’re feeling beset by modern life, here’s where you can see if The Samurai’s Octopus might take you somewhere you’d like to spend some time too. Without standing in a maddeningly slow TSA line.

 

Fan mail stacking like a snowdrift

How did you picture the life of a writer when you first dreamt of becoming one? Did you romanticize your dream? Or were you pragmatic and realistic about it? Compare your dream to the reality. 

By Dietrich

The writing bug first bit me in my early teens. Armed with a cheap ballpoint, a notebook, and the high of my English teacher’s praise, I was ready to riff on Hemingway and Salinger. I didn't exactly picture myself in a Paris café or a Cuban villa, but I figured the prose would just flow out of me. As it turned out, I ended up stuck in a swamp of stubborn idioms and clunky phrases. Writing wasn’t the cakewalk I’d imagined. I tried to turn words into tall tales, but they just wouldn’t fit into anything worth reading. Even at that pimple-age,I knew I was in trouble.

To my credit, I didn’t hold my breath expecting a publisher to send a limo for my shoebox of longhand pages. I didn’t anticipate fan mail stacking up like a snowdrift while The New York Times wept with joy. I was either too pure for all that, perhaps a bit naive, or just savvy enough to know that my “masterpiece” wasn't quite ready for the Big Five. 

Over time, I lost interest in those handwritten pages. They ended up exactly where they belonged: in a heap under my bed, eventually vanishing altogether. I have no idea what happened to them—likely disappeared on some merciful cleaning day. But if they ever turn up posthumously, I just hope there’s no Wi-Fi in the afterlife to see the reviews. I’d die (twice) from the embarrassment.

When the notion to write finally collided with reality many years later, I traded the daydream for the real work of finding my chops. I found that writing a novel is less about being struck by lightning and more about sitting in a chair until my butt aches. I learned the glamorous art of editing the same paragraph seventeen times, and I realized when my brilliant twists weren’t working, and I learned to recognize when my “brilliant” twists weren't working or when my dialogue sounded like an 80s soap opera. 

Early on, I had a talk with myself to brace for the polite rejections and soul-crushing reviews. I looked in the mirror and reminded myself that not everybody likes Salinger or Hemingway either. I was just grateful that I got to do what I loved without having to worry about keeping the lights on. Still am.

Living the Dream

Terry here with our question of the week: How did you picture the life of a writer when you first dreamt of becoming one? Did you romanticize your dream? Or were you pragmatic and realistic about it? Compare your dream to the reality. 

 I was always focused more on the writing than the dream. My vague dream, which emerged gradually, was to write a publishable book. What happened after that was always cloudly. Sure, when I actually hunkered down to write a novel, I had moments of thinking, “What if I write a book that makes it big? What if it sells a million copies?” But I never really pictured what that might mean. 

 My first inkling of what it might be to write something people wanted to read was in seventh grade when our teacher made the assignment that we should a short story about “anything.” I now realize how amazing that was. No constrictions. No “you have to do ‘this’ to get it right.” Just write a story. I don’t remember if it was difficult for me to decide what to write. But I do remember that when it was done, I thought it was a clever, solid story. 

When the teacher was ready to hand back our work, she said there was one that stood out and that she was going to read it aloud. She thought everyone would like it. I remember the rush of knowing, with no reservations, that she was going to read my story. And she did. 

 She didn’t say whose it was until the end. My classmates showered me with praise. And that’s what I always pictured as the life I wanted as a writer—that people would like what I wrote. That people would want to read my stories and would tell me how much they loved them. 

 As a youngster, I thought small. It never occurred to me to write stories and send them off to magazines or to contests. When I read about writers who in their teens sent off their stories with the hopes of getting them published, I’m astounded that they even knew that was possible, much less had the nerve to try. Pragmatic? Realistic? Perhaps. 

But sadly, I think of myself more as lacking in confidence. I didn’t have the confidence to dream, or even to picture myself as a “writer.” But I wrote. In high school when I’d turn in a fiction assignment, my teachers would look at me funny. I know now that they probably were surprised that I had a rich interior life. I had only one teacher who encouraged me to write. But with no suggestion of how that might fit into my world. 

 My actual dream had nothing to do with writing. I wanted to make money. I wanted a job that would support me and where I could excel. It never occurred to me that writing might be that endeavor. At one point I looked into applying for a job as an editor at a publishing house. I didn’t really even know what that meant; just that it would put me into the world of books. I was easily discouraged. Becoming an editor meant moving “back east,” a vague term that for a girl from Texas loomed way too large. And besides, it wasn’t a well-paid job. 

I look back now and think how sad it was that I had no one to guide me. No one who could tell me that as a voracious reader, getting any job in the world of books would be satisfying. (See the end of my post)

 In college, I told my English professor that I wanted to be a writer. He said, “Then don’t major in English literature. Major in something that gets you out in the world where you have experiences.” I majored in political science. And after I graduated, went to work for the CIA. Where I was sent to school to learn how to be a computer programmer/ analyst. I was in IT for the next ten years, first at the CIA, then later at a number of companies in the private sector. I liked IT, and found it rewarding, financially and emotionally. I always liked to achieve a job well-done, so I wasn’t unhappy. 

Still, I often went to my car at lunch and wrote. It took a long time before I began to dream. I wanted to write a novel that would be published. A novel. That was my dream. That “dream” drove me to write novels after work and on weekends. Six of them before I finally got published. 

 To say that I was surprised by the success of my first novel, A Killing at Cotton Hill—winning the Macavity Award, short-listed for various other awards, a best-seller—is an understatement. That success bred in me a passion to do it again…and again. I began to dream bigger, realizing that the success I hoped for was the joy of being immersed in writing, and having people tell me how much they liked the books I wrote. 

Fifteen published novels later, I’m still on the hamster wheel. The only regret I have is that I didn’t persist much earlier. 

My takeaway? If you know someone who is struggling to let their dreams emerge, encourage them. Give them something to dream for.