Making a Conference Work for You

Tell us which conferences are your favorites and why you like to attend them.

-from Susan

A déjà vu moment. I’m sure I’ve answered this one before. My memory is of starting by pointing out the differences between those events that are geared specifically to help writers write better, or market their work successfully, and those that invite readers to come and schmooze with authors. I praised Left Coast Crime and Bouchercon last time around, both events where authors and readers mingle.

I’m going to talk about the writers’ conferences this time. What makes a writers’ conference worth your time, money, and energy?

I’ll start with a salute to much-published, award-winning mystery author Hank Phillippi Ryan, who just posted on Facebook about her day-long attendance at a writers’ conference where she was absorbing as much good advice as possible toward improving her writing. Her openness and enthusiasm for taking a day to become a student at this point in her career highlights the value of a good conference/workshop/class. At any point in your writing process, it will include a nugget – or maybe a lightening strike – that can change your understanding of what makes a good story and how to make yours work. Hank is a pro and she knows we can always be better if we’re willing to park the ego at the door!

You don’t need to spend five days to find that magic moment, and it isn’t necessarily going to come from the most famous author at a prestigious retreat. It might be an online or community college course, or a half-day seminar. The trick is to be open to recognizing valuable insights in the context of what you’re trying to achieve. Scribble whatever it takes to remember – amazing how precious ideas can get lost in the woods! When you get back to your manuscript, keep going back to re-engage with the ideas honestly as you work.

Right now, I have a couple of lightening strikes jotted on Post-Its on the white board in front of me. One came from an online seminar, the other from a workshop, but I’ve heard versions of both many, many times since.

Put your protagonist in a bad situation, then make it worse.

Why write this scene? Every scene has to move some part of your story forward, even if that movement is deliberately hidden from the reader.

How to choose a writers’ conference? Try answering these questions: Where are you in your writing – 50 pages into your first novel or finishing up your third? Are you shy? Are you self-confident enough to talk about your work and share it with others? Are you already published – anywhere, in any format? And, what’s motivating you to invest this amount of money and time in your career right now (your goals, your dream, your promise to yourself)?

Everyone’s different, but here’s the template I use to make the call for myself: What three goals will make it a good investment? The first year, they included getting to know five people I could stay in contact with, people who were at the same early stage of their writing career. Next time, one was getting all the tools to write a damn good query letter. Later, the most important was learning how to ratchet up tension in a plot.  There’s always something to learn, ways to improve my stories or my marketing of my books.  My job in choosing a conference is to set specific goals and promise myself I will come away having done everything I can to reach them.

So, what are your goals, and how will you invest in your writing life this year?

Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear

This week I’d like to welcome Criminal Minds alum Reece Hirsch back to his old stamping grounds.

Reece is the author of four thrillers that draw on his background as a privacy attorney, which gives him a unique perspective for writing the kind of cyberthrillers for which he’s known. The Insider, his first book, was a finalist for the 2011 International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel. His next three books, The Adversary, Intrusion, and the recently released Surveillance, all feature former Department of Justice cybercrimes prosecutor Chris Bruen.

Prior to law school, Reece worked as a journalist in Atlanta for several years, including a stint as an assistant editor of a business magazine. He also edited and published an arts and entertainment magazine in Atlanta. He is a member of the board of directors of the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation (www.VADFoundation.org).  He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and a small, unruly dog. His website is www.reecehirsch.com.

It’s great to have you back, Reece!

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Is there a message in your book that you want readers to grasp?

By Reece Hirsch

First, thank you to Paul for lending me his spot this week. It’s nice to be back at Criminal Minds, where I was a regular circa 2011-2013 or so. There’s been some turnover here since then, but it’s nice to see Meredith, Catriona, Tracy and Susan (who inherited my spot) still keeping the conversation as lively as ever.

My first reaction to this week’s question was that I don’t usually like novels that have an overt “message.” While every book needs to have a purpose and an intent, when I hear the word “message” I hear the groan of wooden floorboards as the author climbs into the pulpit to deliver a sermon. But then I thought about it a little more and I realized that my Chris Bruen cyber thrillers do have a message of sorts that runs through each of the three books. I think of it in terms of the statement that’s printed on rear view mirrors – “Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear.”

By that, I mean that my books tend to deal with a particularly modern sort of dread – the fear of living in a hyper-connected world. Sure, connectedness has its advantages. I love my smart phone. Thanks to the Map app, I get lost a lot less than I used to. But there’s also a downside to all that connectedness – the Map app stores my geolocation data and makes it available to advertisers – and maybe even the NSA.

Technology has made our world smaller, and that means that we can reach out and touch people and things around the world. But the problem is that those people and things can also reach out and touch us with unnerving ease – and their intentions are not always good. For example, the first Bruen book, The Adversary, deals with the sophisticated new generation of computer viruses, exemplified by the Stuxnet virus that was used to destroy Iranian nuclear centrifuges. That sort of targeted “smart bomb” virus would allow an individual or group of hackers to do the sort of damage to national infrastructure that was previously possible only for nations with armies.

Intrusion involves Chinese state-sponsored hackers, who have dedicated their considerable resources and skill to stealing the intellectual property of U.S. corporations, remotely and (relatively) anonymously. My latest Bruen book, Surveillance (Thomas & Mercer, March 15), considers what NSA domestic surveillance might look like in the post-Snowden era. Chris and the head of his computer forensic lab, Zoey Doucet, must find a way to escape an adversary who has access to every phone call, every email, every video feed. I think that every time we go online it’s like swimming in an ocean of data – but we never see the sharks below our feet until it’s too late.

Here’s a snippet from Intrusion in which I address this issue explicitly (and hopefully without getting too preachy):

“It was a truism that a smaller world is a good thing. In theory, it enhanced understanding among disparate cultures, allowed the First and Third Worlds to cross-pollinate. But Chris wasn’t so sure that the world hadn’t been better when everyone had lived their lives within twenty miles of their birthplace.

Today’s hyperconnected way of life was in many ways messier and more fractious than what had gone before. A century ago, in order for opposing worldviews to clash, someone had to dispatch an invading army. Now zealots anywhere in the world could launch attacks large and small against the US so long as they had the requisite technical skills. Of course, US companies had the same strike capabilities, which was what put Chris on the train to Shenzhen.”

P.S.: My book tour for Surveillance has a distinctly Criminals Minds feel to it. I’ll be doing an event with Paul D. Marks (and Tyler Dilts) at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego on April 2, and Janet Rudolph’s Literary Salon on April 14 in Berkeley with Susan Shea (and Terry Shames).

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Thanks again, Reece.

And if you’re in the San Diego area, please join Reece, Tyler Dilts and me, Saturday, April 2nd, at Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego. 4pm ~ 5943 Balboa Avenue, Suite #100, San Diego, CA 92111 ~ 858-268-4747
http://www.mystgalaxy.com/event/reece-hirsch-paul-d-marks-and-tyler-dilts-sign-san-diego 

Beautiful People

Q: Is there a message you want readers to get from your books?

A: Apparently, yes. (But I swear no.) My agent spotted it first and brought it up. For some reason, in my books, I seem to be obsessed with the idea that appearances don't matter and, in fact, good looks and grooming - especially in males - are signs of moral turptitude. (In real life, I'm as vain and shallow as anyone you could hope to meet.)

If there's a potential love interest or even mere male sidekick for one of my contemporary protagonists - Gus in The Day She Died, Stig in The Child Garden, Lowell in Quiet Neighbors (out next week) he is guaranteed not to be much of a Prince Charming.

Let's see: these three between them have got long crinkly hair, brushed hard without being washed so that it sits in ridged hanks, bumpy red skin from using a blunt razor, cold purple feet, eczema, bad crowns going black along the gumline, sweat rings on a shapeless hoodie, big yellow teeth stained in stripes from coffee and red wine, a stale, frayed, fawn cardigan, and a haemorrhoid pillow.

Mr Darcy has no competition in any of my stories really. It was Lowell's grey and yellow teeth in Quiet Neighbors that made my agent finally raise her voice in protest. So I gave him a run-in with some whitening strips about halfway through. Further than that I would not - could not - go.

If I wrote erotica . . .

If it's not deliberate, what is it? Well, I don't like reading stories about aspirationally beautiful people. You know the ones: she's got a tip-tilted nose, unruly curls, coltish legs and a cute flaw; he's got dimple in his chin, a peppering of grey at his temples and can lift her up and carry her without throwing his back out. They both run five miles every morning and they never get a Starbucks cup stuck under the brake pedal.

I'm not much more keen on characters who're perfect on the inside either. Characters with goals. Characters who could finish the sentence "My core values are ...."

These are not my people. And their stories don't interest me much. I like hanging out with the ones who're bumbling around cluelessly, trying to do the right thing and beating themselves up when they get it wrong. Pitch one of these people into the worst day of their life and there's a tale I want to tell.

Messages and themes by Cathy Ace

Is there a message in your book that you want readers to grasp?

This is a good question – and my answer is both no, and yes. “No”, because I never set out to write a book that has, at its core, an overarching “message” (other than don’t kill someone or do something spiteful, vindictive, horrid or just plain awful because you WILL be brought to justice); “Yes” because I find I always seem to end up writing a book where there’s some sort of theme running through it. 

Cait Morgan Mystery #7 - arrives in April

My Cait Morgan Mysteries are traditional, closed-circle mysteries – classic whodunits with a modern setting. As such, I have to write every character from the point of view that the reader should have a good reason (or two) to be able to imagine they might have dunit. Thus, everyone has secrets, everyone lies – or at least omits – and everyone has to face the fact their past and present inter-relationships with the titular corpse brings their moral judgement into question. Thus, all these books are written with the undercurrent that anyone is capable of murder given the right circumstances. Maybe that’s a theme because it has to be….but there are other themes too. In April, Cait Morgan Mystery #7, THE CORPSE WITH THE GARNET FACE, is published, and, like all the Cait books, it has a thread running through it; in this instance it’s about how appearances can be deceptive...or not. Bud discovers he had an uncle, now dead, and, when he follows the man’s final wishes and travels to Amsterdam to dig into the truth about the man’s past, he has to work out how – if at all – the large port-wine birthmark covering half of his late Uncle Jonas’s face might have affected his life. Do we “judge a book by its cover” when the book is another human being?

In the WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries each book certainly has a theme, if not a message. It might be a simple theme, such as the strength of friendship or the different types of relationships between parents and children, or maybe some readers will pick up on the way modern technology impacts our everyday lives. Not themes I would call “messages” but they are certainly there as touchstones.

Cathy Ace writes the WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries (book #2 THE CASE OF THE MISSING MORRIS DANCER was published in February, and book #1 THE CASE OF THE DOTTY DOWAGER was published in trade paperback on March 1st) and the Cait Morgan Mysteries (book #7 THE CORPSE WITH THE GARNET FACE is published in paperback in April). Find out more about Cathy and her work, and sign up for her newsletter at http://cathyace.com/  (Sign up by April 1st and you'll be entered to win a signed copy of The Corpse with the Garnet Face.)

Keep Smiling and Sheath Your Knife

"Is there a message in your book that you want readers to grasp?"

- from Susan

Yes: Don’t kill people. It’s not worth the hassle.

Sorry, I’m late posting. I’m on the board of the northern California Sisters in Crime chapter and sent a request for information to all 110 members Sunday. My inbox is flooded and it feels a little like the episode of “I Love Lucy” where Lucy is stuck at the end of the conveyer belt that’s delivering (what was it – candy?) faster than she can deal with it.

Anyway, I can’t say I consciously begin a book with the idea of a social, ethical, or moral theme other than the above. But I do try to reflect the world – my world – in the characters. So, in the Dani O’Rourke series set in San Francisco and an art museum, even though I don’t make an issue of it – in fact, I might challenge readers to know who I mean – there are gay men who are simply part of the community, there’s a black woman who is Dani’s esteemed colleague but who has an interesting life outside of Dani’s circle, and there are older people who aren’t senile and who don’t fit any stereotype.

I guess I do look hard and without favor on the wealthiest among us who have chosen to separate themselves from the community, who choose not to do good with their money, and who really, truly, believe they are above the law. But I try to balance that will uber wealthy people who are generous, community-minded, and choose to live connected lives. This is an issue that has become major in this election cycle but I started writing about the most self-centered ultra rich long before it became a spotlighted issue, perhaps because I’ve had professional dealings with a few in the past.

I recently completed the first book in a new series that’s set in rural contemporary France. The only theme there for me is pretty much the same as Jane Austen’s: When you upset the status quo and the social order an insular community, it involves everyone. And until there is a resolution, everyone will be jarred from the nicely working machinery of social order.

Lest this sound like I’m an avenging angel, I’m not. I look on all of this with the same jaded, slightly cynical sense of humor that dear Jane and many others since have brought to the subject of the perennial dances within societies. Sometimes I have to work hard to bring that same humor to my perspective on real life social issues, but in fiction, I can still smile!

Everyone is Fair Game

Did you base any characters in your books off of friends or family?

by Paul D. Marks

Most of my characters are based on people I know or have known, or see or have seen in my various life adventures, at least in part. Those adventures can be anything from mundane daily life events like walking the dogs, going to the market or bookstore, to more exciting things, such as SCUBA diving and a hopefully once-in-a-lifetime experience like pulling a gun on the LAPD! They are also, of course, based on me and most of them have a part of me in them. It could be a big part or a little part, but since I know me better than I know anyone else there’s always some seepage by osmosis. Sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously.

Both my lead and secondary characters are based on people I’ve known through the years. And then there’s part of a name here or there, from people I’ve known. Bad guys are often based on people I, uh, don’t like... But to say that this character or that is based on me or so-and-so wouldn’t be accurate because for the most part they’re composites of people I know or have come across.

And some of them are simply based on observations of people I see here or there. For example, I was in the original Barney’s Beanery (click the link for Barney’s to read a history of it, it’s pretty interesting: https://barneysbeanery.com/about/), a famous LA dive and two guys were playing pool, got into a fight. Beer flying. Pool cues cracking. It ended up as a scene in something I was working on.

My latest story, Nature of the Beast, up at David Cranmer’s Beat to a Pulp (http://www.beattoapulp.com/wz20160303-pdm-natureofthebeast.html), is a noir story about a

hitman with a heart of lead. Now, I’m not saying I do or don’t know any hitmen. But either way, the character of hitman Jack Lake is based on the experiences and world outlooks of people I’ve known over the years, as well as on parts of my own experiences (and no, I’m not a hitman). We extrapolate traits, characteristics and motivations for characters from our own lives or the lives of people we’ve known or have come across, even if the characters are different in some ways from the real people. So you can take character traits from anyone and insert them into any character that they’ll work for. I may not know any hitmen, but I know some hard people and so their traits make it into Jack.

Everything and everyone is fair game. Writers observe and borrow from everything – people watching in the airport, making up stories in our heads about who they are and what they’re doing. Or sometimes a friend does something or tells us about an experience in their life that we find compelling, which we “borrow” for a story. Often they’ll be very loosely based on something we’ve heard or read about. For example a friend might have gone through an unpleasant divorce and told you about it, but in your story you embellish so one of the divorcing couple plots to murder the other, whereas in real life the unpleasantness might have only been in arguing over who gets to keep the dog. So watch what you say or do in front of a writer, you might just end up in their next book….

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And now for the usual BSP: Check out David Cranmer's interview with me at: http://davidcranmer.blogspot.com/2016/03/drinking-with-nilsson-freaking-out-mork.html

And check out my article on Vortex and the Green Absinthe Fairy at Mystery Playground's Drinks with Reads:
http://www.mysteryplayground.net/2016/02/vortex-and-green-absinthe-fairy.html

Anthony voters please consider my short story, "My Enemies Have Sweet Voices", from Down & Out Books’ anthology Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea, for Best Short Story.

And please consider Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea for Best Anthology.

Subscribe to my Newsletter

www.PaulDMarks.com

Doreen and Laura

By Catriona

Do I ever base characters on real people?

Well, let's get this out of the way. I never base nasty characters on people I don't like, lovingly describing their bad clothes, breath and personalities. I mean, truly, hardly ever. Seldom. Not for while. In short, yes.

Moving on.

The second Dandy Gilver novel THE BURRY MAN'S DAY was set in the village where I was born, like my father before me, and begins during the second weekend of August in 1923, when my Godmother, the redoubtable Auntie Doreen, was just six weeks old.

I had Dandy get landed with the unpleasant task of judging the bonny baby competition at the local fair and, despite the advice of the judges in the agricultural categories (who do it pretty much by weight), Dandy found herself diverted by a little red-haired scrap with speedwell blue eyes who reached out and stroked Dandy's fox fur with delight.

That was my Auntie Doreen all over. She adored expensive clothes, shoes and cosmetics and would buy a Jenner's dress the wrong colour that didn't fit and have it altered and dyed, rather than go next door to Marks and Spencer's and get the perfect thing for a third of the price. (She died before I started dumpster-diving so she never had to deal with that horror.)

Then last year in The Child Garden I revisited another, very different but just as redoubtable, woman who used to be part of my life. Laura McRoberts was my Step-Grandmother-in-law and she was a splendid old trout. She had been a minister's wife, although that probably only sums her for Scots. Americans should imagine absolute self-assurance and a brusque kindliness delivered in ringing tones. With scones.

By the time I met Laura she was blind and had had both legs amputated, but she still lived alone in her own little house and wouldn't let visitors help with the scones. She also had a granite belief in her recall of Edinburgh and would argue you to numb silence about the street lay-out and bus routes that she knew from the 60s . . . and you'd been on that morning, coming to see her.

God, she was infuriating. And how I loved her! Miss Drumm in THE CHILD GARDEN  is Laura from the peremptory remarks fired at lesser beings (that's just about everyone) to her soft-heartedness around animals and fierce contempt for anyone who harmed them. Writing it felt a lot like visiting her again.

Me, myself, and I, confess... by Cathy Ace

Did you base any characters in your books on friends or family?

To all my friends and family – the answer to this question is…if I did, I only did it for the nice characters!

To everyone else reading this…I have to admit, yes, I did. However, in the spirit of fairness, before I lay bare any secrets about other people, I’ll do it to myself.

                                                 

Me, myself, and even I, are very much the basis for Cait Morgan: she’s facing fifty (I was 52 when the first book was published, just fifty-and-a-half when I wrote it); she's a short, overindulgent Welsh Canadian foodie who teaches at a university in British Columbia (this was me when I began writing the series, though I have since left that day job); she’s quite bossy, judgmental and self-centered (sadly me); she has a difficult past when it comes to men (definitely me) including a dead

ex-boyfriend (unfortunately me – though I wasn’t arrested on suspicion of his murder, as Cait was); she finds herself with a chance of happiness she’d never expected and marriage to a wonderful man who balances her life in ways she never knew it needed (happily me).

Cait and I are from the same part of Swansea, went to the same school (Llwyn y bryn), attended the same university from which we both graduated in psychology, then we even took the same job – working in a marketing communications agency on a variety of advertising, PR and media accounts. At that point our career paths went off in different directions: I stayed in the world of marketing communications setting up my own business (at the idiotically tender age of 28) which I eventually grew to be the largest of its type in Europe. I sold it and “retired” at 40, only then entering the world of academe as an adjunct professor of marketing on the MBA course at the University of British Columbia and then at Simon Fraser University. Cait left the world of marketing communications in her early twenties – irritated by the folks she worked with – and took her Masters’ degree at Cambridge. She left the UK for Canada to escape the tabloids (I didn’t have to do this, thank goodness) and wound up at the University of Vancouver (a mash-up of UBC and SFU…because I can’t afford any lawsuits!). We both belong to Mensa, enjoy the company of Labradors and will always try something new to eat or drink, even if it’s a nose-wrinkling experience. Neither of us enjoys the idea of exercise, let alone doing it, and I like the fact she solves whodunits with her brain, not using any sort of a weapon (okay, maybe she’s resorted to bonking someone on the head with a champagne bottle, but that’s about it). 

Having exposed myself – what about anyone else? Cait has a sister, so do I. Cait’s sister is Sian, and she has some elements of my own sister in her: a love for, and deep understanding of, opera and classical music; a particular enjoyment of the voice of Jonas Kaufmann; an enviable ability to knit; Sian lives in Perth, Australia – my sister did so for years. That said, my sister isn’t married with children, so I gave Sian some “additions” my sister doesn’t have.

Me with "half of Annie Parker"

In the WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries I have a few people in mind when I’m writing. Annie Parker is a mixture of two good friends: the real Londoner Annie has been my very good friend for more than twenty years and brings the clumsy elements of the character (even she’ll admit this is true), while Eustelle (of St Lucian heritage, with a love of hot sauce and an acrimonious relationship with her backside) was my next door neighbor in London for almost two decades – I’ve pinched her name for Annie Parker’s mother. Carol Hill is also a synthesis of two people I know well: Carol, who’s not Welsh but is lovely and wonderfully bright when it comes to anything to do with numbers, and Chris with whom I shared a flat at university, who came from a Welsh farm and was the gentlest person you could wish to meet, with a warm, ready smile and always ready lend a helping hand. Mavis MacDonald is a mix of another of my university room-mates, Jennifer, who was a sharp, intense Scot with a deeply-held belief that a life lived in the service of justice was the best way to be, and Rose, who was the lady who cleaned the office I had at UBC – she was doing it so she and the family could enjoy a couple of months in a condo in Maui every year…her reputation for not taking any nonsense from anyone (whatever their title) was well-earned. Christine Wilson-Smythe is based upon three people…all of whom will remain nameless, but with whom I used to spend a fair amount of “social time” in London during the ‘eighties  and ‘nineties. It was the heyday of the Sloane Rangers, let’s just leave it at that.

The favorite hot sauce of "the other half of Annie Parker"

I hope no one comes after me with a knife for this! Honestly, even when I find myself using elements of someone I know for a character – be it a quirk of their movement or a phrase they use often (sometimes unwittingly) – I do it with love. If I didn’t enjoy spending time with my characters I’d never visit them again. I will also admit that the characteristics of many more friends and family members probably also seep into my writing – unbidden and often unnoticed by even this author herself.

Cathy Ace writes the WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries (book #2 THE CASE OF THE MISSING MORRIS DANCER was published in February, and book #1 THE CASE OF THE DOTTY DOWAGER was published in trade paperback on March 1st) and the Cait Morgan Mysteries (book #7 THE CORPSE WITH THE GARNET FACE is published in paperback in April). Find out more about Cathy and her work, and sign up for her newsletter at http://cathyace.com/  (Sign up by April 1st and you'll be entered to win a signed copy of The Corpse with the Garnet Face.)