Bad Girls

Bad Girls are not necessarily femme fatales here, but a female presence in a book or movie that wreaks havoc. There have been plenty of elderly ladies that have done such a thing. (Arsenic and Old Lace comes to mind). Or the teenager in The Childrens' Hour. Or the child in The Bad Seed.

In Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Gene Tierney plays a woman so obsessed with her new husband, she will destroy anyone she perceives to be a threat to her marriage.

I was scared to death of this movie seeing it on The Late Show as a kid.
It still scares me today. I think it might have been the first time I saw a movie where someone with the face of an angel did such hideous things.

The title is a quote from William Shakespeare's Hamlet. In Act I, Scene V, the Ghost urges Hamlet not to seek vengeance against Queen Gertrude, but rather to "leave her to heaven, and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her."

Who is your favorite Bad Girl? Characters from books, tv or the movies .

How I Came to Write This Story" Jane Hammons

HOW I WROTE THIS STORY

Mapping the Territory

published in Shotgun Honey.

By Jane Hammons

When I was about 10, I was goofing around with some tin cans (don’t ask) and almost cut my thumb off. After the stitches healed, I thought if I was ever fingerprinted, I’d have a pretty cool thumbprint. In the early 80s, long before laparoscopic surgery, I was a kidney donor for my older sister. When I told people I was having the surgery, they often made comments like, “Wow, your bikini days are over.” A big fuck you was usually my response. I’d wear a bikini if I wanted to, scar or no scar.

So when I read the “I don’t really mind the scars” challenge here at pattinase, I remembered that anger. This reminded me of an article by Jessa Crispin I’d read in The Smart Set that better expresses than I can some of my concerns about representations of the female body in crime fiction. But there’s no better way to kill a story than to burden it with a bunch of “isms” and a personal axe to grind. I didn’t make the deadline to post a story for the challenge because it took me a while to get off my hobbyhorse.

Then the character—a woman who begins cutting herself as a child—came to me. My grandmother used to talk about family members who “show their Indian,” a phrase that refers to skin color, which, depending on her mood was either something to be proud of or a cause for shame. I thought of this as a “scar” that my Cherokee grandmother dealt with most of her life. I remembered that I kind of liked my thumb scar. And that helped me understand the kind of tension I wanted in this story between impulses that are deadly yet also creative. Once these things started bumping up against each other, I began looking at maps and working with Indian place names. From a long ago anthropology class on body art, Hunapo, a Maori skilled in the art of skin packing, showed up. At that point, what had been a big noisy collision in my head, started making a strange kind of sense, and I began “Mapping the Territory.”

Jane Hammons teaches writing at UC Berkeley where she is the recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award. She has work included in Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer (W. W. Norton 2010) and The Maternal is Political (Seal Press 2008). She recently received a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Story Society for Best Flash Story 2011. Her most recent crime fiction has appeared in A Twist of Noir, Crimespree Magazine, Powder Flash Burn, Pulp Metal Magazine, and Verbicide Magazine.

Sunday Writer's Forum

A terrific interview with Megan on Memphis Public Radio can be found here.







Question 2.

What is the average length of time it takes you to finish a polished story?

P.A. I would say a month. I might also be working on another story and go back and forth, but probably a month. I like rewriting more than writing and I think that slows me down.

Michael Bracken: Actual writing time? From a few hours up to about 10 hours, Rarely more. Rarely less. However, years may pass between the time I make notes for a story I'd like to write and when I actually write it.

Question 3

Do you outline your stories?

Michael almost never outlines and if he does, it's just a sketch.

I never do either. Even at my attempts at a novel, I just kept track of the characters birth dates on a chart. None of the plot.

How about the rest of you?

Throwing in the Towel

I wrote last year about how the library in Troy Michigan was closing due to a no vote on a library millage. Well, this week the voters of Troy (population 80,000) came out and reversed that decision and the library is safe for five years. Sanity reigns.

**************************

Jeff Meyerson and I have been discussing how long we stick with a book before throwing in the towel. He mentioned a fifty-page rule; I wish I was that generous.

If a book has very good reviews, or word of mouth, or I have liked other books by that author, I might stick with it that long even if it wasn't interesting me.

But I have closed books after 5 pages, 20 pages, 200 pages. And once or twice within ten pages of finishing.

I have a friend who has finished every book she started except one. I can't imagine this because I am a very careless chooser. Especially with library books. I have a table full of them now, all due in two weeks. Like the cover: pick it up, Like the title: pick it up. Read a good review, pick it up. See where I am going. Incidentally THE SISTER BROTHERS was a sure pick-up for me. Terrific title, terrific cover. But will I like what's inside?

What about you? How long do you give a book?

Mia from Michigan

Mia is the daughter of good friends and is making her way in the big city of New York. Aside from making delectable pastries and selling them at Three Tarts in Chelsea, she is making wonderful jewelry.

Check out her inventory above.


New York seems to call to our kids. Mia has studied the culinary arts in Italy. Stop by or give her website a look. Isn't she the prettiest girl?

THE SUMMING UP, Friday, August 5, 2011

Next week, check with Todd Mason for the links.
Come away with me to the Traverse City Film Festival. (at Crimespree Cinema)

Yvette Banek, Detecting Men, Willetta Helsing, Killer Books, Jean Swanson and Dean James
Bill Crider, The Satan Bug, Ian Stuart (Alistair MacLean)
Scott Cupp, Talking Man, Terry Bisson
Martin Edwards, I'll Be Judge, I'll Be Jury, Milward Kennedy
Jerry House, The Poetical Words of Jonathan E. Hoag
Randy Johnson, The Isotope Man, Charles Eric Maine
George Kelley, First Command, A., Bertram Chandler
B.V. Lawson, Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes, edited by Paula L. Woods
Evan Lewis, Hank & Muddy, Stephen Mertz
Steve Lewis/Bill Pronzini, Hangman's Dozen, David Alexander
Todd Mason, The Overlook Encyclopedia: Horror, edited by Phil Hardy; Romancing the Vampire, David J. Skal
J.F. Norris, The Man with My Face, Samuel W. Taylor
Richard Pangburn, Night Dogs, Kent Anderson
Eric Peterson, Such Men Are Dangerous, Lawrence Block
J. King Pierce, Miss Lizzie, Walter Satterthwait
David Rachels, Violent Saturday, W.L. Heath
James Reasoner, The Seduction of Lucy Mattson, Dell McLauren (Thomas P. Ramirez)
Richard Robinson, Pern Books, Part 2, Anne McCaffrey
Gerard Saylor, Valley of Lights, Stephen Gallagher
Michael Slind, The Sinful Stones, Peter Dickinson
Ron Scheer, Red Men and White, Owen Wister
Kerrie Smith, The Killing at Badger's Cliff, Carolyn Graham
Michel Williams, Do Not Fold, Spindle, Mutilate, Doris Miles Disney

Friday's Forgotten Books, August 5, 2011

Michel Williams
I’m a Northern Californian with a gentle Texas influence (otherwise known as husband of forty years.) Been a reader all my life, knitter, sometimes weaver and shop owner, but my computer prowess consists of an occasional conquering of the comment process. In a long-ago time, the bookmobile ladies who stopped on the corner every Saturday carried “Do
Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate.”



Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate by Doris Miles Disney

I read this book in 1970 then picked it up a couple months ago as a
library discard and re-read it for the first time in what…forty-one
years! Fifty-eight year old women are no longer considered elderly, nor are they called spinstresses and men aren’t much called beaus anymore. But people still get into mischief and Doris Miles Disney’s book is still a fun story of cause and effect.

At 58, ever a clown, Sophie T. will do anything for a joke and when she encourages her bridge group to invent “tall, blonde, blue-eyed” Rebecca Meade (Sophie T.’s dead aunt’s name) for a mail-in date form to Scientific Associates, trouble is not far behind. When one of the date-matches calls Sophie T.’s unlisted phone number, Sophie switches to a soft drawl, strings the caller along and, as Rebecca, makes a date with him. Only later does she have second thoughts.

“She tried to shrug off what she’d done on the way to the parking lot, but wasn’t quite able to. She wished she hadn’t gone to the Calico Club. Or, better still, that she had refused to make the date. It wasn’t funny, after all. It was stupid. It was mean. Childish. Something to be ashamed of, never to be mentioned to anyone.”

The unlikely hero appears toward the end of the book; an irascible street-smart cat named Helen who deigns to live with a real girl called Becky Meade.

“Helen first began to hang around her door back in February, a full-grown starveling cat with fleas. A female cat, the girl thought, as she made the mistake of feeding it. A poor homeless cat who bit and scratched her out of strangeness; out of fear, she thought, as she made the mistake of picking it up. She would name it Helen, she thought, as she went out to buy a flea collar.

It was spring before she found out that Helen was an altered male cat. By that time he had learned to answer – when he felt like it – to his name. It was too late to change it.”

Yvette Banek
Paul Bishop
Bill Crider
Scott Cupp
Martin Edwards
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
B.V. Lawson
Evan Lewis
Steve Lewis/Bill Pronzini
Todd Mason
J.F. Norris
Richard Pangburn
Eric Peterson
J. Kingston Pierce
David Rachels
James Reasoner
Richard Robinson
Gerard Saylor
Ron Scheer
Michael Slind
Kerrie Smith

My Life at the Theater: A Few Good Men

This is from the movie, of course. I saw A FEW GOOD MEN at THE MUSIC BOX on Broadway in 1990. Phil was working on a book on V.F. Calverton and we went to New York quite often that year. We stayed at the Iroquois Hotel, which was a dump then and expensive now.

The play, by Aaron Sorkin, starred the gorgeous Megan Gallagher (what happened to her), Tom Hulce, Mark Nelson, Stephen Lang, Clark Gregg and was pretty amazing.

HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK: Jeff Shelby's Liquid Smoke

LIQUID SMOKE, Jeff Shelby

Back to the future. That's what this feels like. Back to the future.

When I completed my second book, Wicked Break, sometime in 2005, I knew that I needed to take the next book in a different direction. I didn't want to fall in the deadly trap that every series writer faces and continue to write different versions of the same story. And I wanted to challenge myself as a writer. I wanted to write a “bigger” book, one that forced me to think a bit harder about what I was doing.

It came to me easily. I read a news article about a death penalty case and it struck a chord with me. As someone who is anti-death penalty (actually, I'm anti-killing the wrong guy penalty) I thought it would be a challenge to write from the viewpoint of someone who was in favor of the death penalty. It would force me to think from the other side of the equation. When you write in first person like I do, it's easy to let your own views and opinions filter into your characters. Not quite as easy when your character believes something completely different than you do. It forced me to write a much different book than I'd ever written before.

And when I wrote “The End” I was thrilled because it felt like the best thing I'd ever written. My early readers and my agent agreed. I'd pushed myself and my characters and it worked. I wrote a big book that would break out the series.

And, uh, then I got dropped.

Ouch.

As happens regularly in publishing, my publisher decided to go in a different direction. Had nothing to do with the third book and everything to do with sales and some changes within the house. And all of a sudden, my great book didn't have a home. Didn't feel fair, but that is publishing.

I was optimistic, though. I'd received great reviews on the first two books and even though moving a series isn't ideal, I was hopeful that we could find a new home for Liquid Smoke.

It only took five years.

Five long years. Five long years that included: multiple rejections, rewriting the book as a standalone with new characters, more rejections, changing agents, going a year or so without an agent, finding a new agent who believed in the book, three other completed novels that stalled out and trying to get right with the idea that the best book I'd ever written would never see the light of day. I really got to the point where I believed it wasn't going to happen.

Fortunately, my new agent disagreed. She thought it still had legs, that she could find it a home. I was skeptical, but figured there was nothing to lose in shopping it again.

And she was right. (Which is why she's the greatest agent walking the face of the Earth.) She sold it to Tyrus Books, who took it on with great enthusiasm and turned it into an even better book. All of the excitement I felt at the completion of the book five years ago is back. I can't wait for people to read this book when it's released on August 23^rd.

It's still the best thing I've ever written.

Speed Reading

*** Does anyone know which Lawrence Block book was set in New Hope, PA?
Thanks to Heath for the answer and I have downloaded it.


Reading TOLSTOY AND THE PURPLE CHAIR, about a woman who read a book a day for a year. She reads 70 pages an hour. A few years ago I read her website every day, but the book is much better. I hate to say it but the addition of her dead sister makes her more human. I never like Joyce Carol Oates more than in her period of grief in A Widow's Story. What does this say about me? Or Joan Didion in her book on the same.

Anyway, what I am wondering is, can you really absorb a book at that speed? Do you come away with the same experience that I get at perhaps half that? Maybe the speed is irrelevant. I don't know. You must be skipping over words. How do you know which ones to skip? Does you brain learn to filter out parts of speech?

Also: Is reading a book a day a good thing? Do you hone your skills, strengthen a muscle, or does it become mostly a race you have to finish? A chore, a duty, a bet won.

How fast can you read a book? Do the books you read quickly stay with you more or less than ones you savor? I know I am justifying my slow reading speed by these questions. But I need to look up and think about what I've read. Maybe it's different for others. Maybe you can think and read at the same time. I can't.

First Wednesday Book Review, Time Will Darken It. William Maxwell

William Maxwell was one of my favorite writers. He died about a decade ago leaving a handful of novels and many shorts stories and essays. My favorite of his novels is TIME WILL DARKEN IT.

When the King family is paid a visit from distant Southern relatives, Austin King, eager to impress a female cousin and repay their kindness to his father, behaves in such a way as to threaten his marriage, his law practice, and his reputation as a young attorney. His pregnant wife is especially torn asunder by his actions.

Maxwell makes every character in this seemingly ordinary story come to life. I can't think of many books I closed so reluctantly and yet with such complete satisfaction. His novels include:

• Bright Center of Heaven (1934)
• They Came Like Swallows (1937)
  • An autobiographical novella about the cruel impact of the 1918 flu epidemic, as seen through the eyes of an 8-year-old midwestern child and his family
• The Folded Leaf (1945)
• Time Will Darken It (1948)
• The Chateau (1961)
• So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) (Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal and National Book Award for Fiction)
  • An aging man remembers a boyhood friendship he had in 1920s Illinois which falters following a murder.

For more First Wednesdays reviews, visit Barrie Summy right here.

HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK: Chris Ewan

How I Came to Write this Book

THE GOOD THIEF’S GUIDE TO VENICE

I’m fascinated by favourite books. And I don’t just mean the stories they tell within their pages, I mean the memories and emotions that can be tied up in a particular edition.

Take the books on the shelves in my study. There are a whole bunch of titles that it would kill me to lose. There’s my Penguin paperback of Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD, the book that first made me want to write, with its yellowed pages, bent cover and cracked spine. There’s my second-hand Vintage Crime edition of THE LONG GOODBYE, the book that introduced me to Raymond Chandler, with a pencil note on the inside cover that tells me I bought it for three dollars from a second-hand book stall in New Orleans. There’s my Faber & Faber paperback of Paul Auster’s ORACLE NIGHT, a book I’ve read more times than any other. There are my treasured signed editions of a quartet of hardboiled gems by a certain Megan Abbott. And there’s my school thesaurus, which dumb superstition makes me hold onto and use to this day, even though it’s falling apart, the pages all torn and hopelessly out of sequence…

I could go on. Believe me. And it’s the same for Charlie Howard – hack mystery writer and globetrotting burglar-for-hire -- the lead character in my Good Thief’s Guide series of mystery novels. The only difference is that Charlie’s emotions are all wrapped up in a single book -- a signed first edition of Dashiell Hammett’s THE MALTESE FALCON.

THE MALTESE FALCON is the one constant in Charlie’s life, the only possession he takes with him wherever he travels in the world. He keeps it in an airtight picture frame above his writing desk. Charlie’s superstitious, too – I guess a lot of writers are – and he truly believes that he’s incapable of writing a publishable book without Hammett’s novel watching over him.

I knew all this before I wrote THE GOOD THIEF’S GUIDE TO VENICE, but I didn’t know why the book was so important to Charlie, or how he’d come to own it. I didn’t know exactly how much it meant to him, or just how far he’d go to protect it.

So I decided to find out, and it’s for this reason that VENICE opens with Charlie discovering a glamorous female cat burglar inside his apartment, stealing his prized copy of Hammett’s book. And from there, everything that Charlie thought he knew is turned on its head. This time around, he’s not the criminal, but the victim. He’s no longer the most talented thief in town. And when he finds himself blackmailed into breaking-into a Venetian palazzo in exchange for getting his book back safely, it’s not to steal something, but to return it.

One final note. I now have something else in common with Charlie. A couple of years ago, my wife gave me a birthday gift. It’s a hardcover edition of THE MALTESE FALCON, published by Orion in 2004, with an introduction by Sara Paretsky, illustrations by David Eccles, and a handsome slipcase cover. I keep it on the low bookcase to the side of my desk, where it watches over me as I type. And it’s the book I value above all others.

Chris Ewan is the author of three previous novels, all of them shortlisted for CrimeFest’s Last Laugh Award. They are THE GOOD THIEF’S GUIDE TO AMSTERDAM (Winner of the Long Barn Books First Novel Award), THE GOOD THIEF’S GUIDE TO PARIS and THE GOOD THIEF’S GUIDE TO VEGAS. You can find him on Twitter @chrisewan and his website is www.thegoodthief.co.uk

Chris has just signed a two book deal with Faber and Faber for two standalones. Congrats to Chris!!

Signifiers

For want of a better word, I will call them signifiers. But in four movies I recently saw there was the moment when a minor symptom telescoped an eventual event and these in particular are used so often as to be cliches. A woman feels queasy: pregnancy; a woman complains of headaches: brain tumor; a man rubs his arm: heart attack.

I bet there are lots of others too. I don't know why writers can't think of a more unique way to foreshadow a coming event if it needs to be foreshadowed.

These are used so much they create no tension and, in fact, elicit groans. What's the problem here?

"The Perfect Day" at ALL DUE RESPECT

Right here.

Thanks A.C.

"How I Came to Write This Story" Dana Kabel

Dana C. Kabel: How I Came To Write This Story

One of the most abhorrent things I can imagine is harm of any kind coming to a child. My love of children comes hand in hand with the fear for them that they may fall prey to any of a number of dangerous things in this world.

This has been a recurring theme in my writing, and when I can, I love to dole out justice to the evil offenders. And while many of my protagonists are anti-heroes and luckless criminals, I don’t give any sympathy to the characters that harbor a mean bone in their body towards kids.

If you really want to demonize a character in your writing, make them an enemy of children. If someone is willing to hurt a child, their evil knows no bounds. Look at one of the foulest villains in literature, Shakespeare’s Richard III. The deformed, manipulative, bloodthirsty royal can pull a little sympathy from the reader until the last act of the play when he has his own young nephew princes smothered to death in their beds to eliminate any threat to his crown. That is when the evil within him truly blossoms and he becomes completely despicable.

In my story, The Sitter, the character C.J. is a ruthless criminal and a dangerous guy, but he wouldn’t purposefully cause any harm to come to Jesse, the toddler that he watches. In fact, if it came down to it, C.J. would probably kill to protect his young charge. That doesn’t change the fact that Jesse is in great danger by being around C.J. and is exposed to some pretty traumatic experiences for a child.

The story was actually inspired, in part, by the Shrek toy that Jesse gets in the Happy Meal that C.J. buys for him. I was travelling to New Jersey with my wife and two year old daughter who was, at the time, attached to a plastic Shrek doll that her big brother had given to her. The doll was not a Happy Meal toy, but my daughter was sitting in her car seat eating cold fries out of a Happy Meal box with one hand and clutching the plastic green ogre in the other. My wife was driving and we were having a discussion about her going back to work and the dilemma of finding affordable child care for our daughter and who in the world we could trust to watch her when…bing! The light went on and the story pretty much wrote itself in my head right there.

I took out my notebook and jotted the basic elements down so that I could flesh it out later, because it is kind of hard to write a story while a two year old is singing like Fiona from Shrek and trying to feed you her cold French fries. I can imagine that it would be difficult if I had to hold onto her while I kicked someone’s door in and pumped them full of hot lead!

There is a link to The Sitter and other stories at www.thenonstopbullet.blogspot.com

Sunday Discussion for Short Story Writers

I'd love to have you all sitting around a circle because I'd like to know more about your process as they call it. I originally posted a long list of questions but Rob Kitchin suggested doing one at a time so it could function as an ongoing discussion. Here's the first one for those interested in answering it. Next Sunday I will post another if interest merits it.



1. How often do you finish the rough draft of a story in one sitting?

I never finish the rough draft in one sitting. I would say it takes me about two weeks to finish a rough although not very rough draft and that is working on it nearly every day. I am very slow because I start with word one each time I sit down. So when I am done the rough draft, the story is pretty smooth from all the rewriting. At least the first half is.

Saturday Night Music" Miles Davis

Fictional Characters

Reading my first Jack Reacher novel (61 HOURS) and I am knocked out by the plot, but even more so by Childs' evocation of Jack Reacher. Of course, no one as sure-footed and unstoppable as Jack ever existed, but I don't mind that at all. We have plenty of Jim Rockford's who get bounced off walls.

Please don't tell me Tom Cruise is going to play him.

Who was the last fictional character who knocked you out? I don't mean romantically but rather as a unforgettable creation?

Best Sex Scene in a Movie?

My review of Tabloid is here.

No links for Forgotten Friday here today. Check out Todd Mason.

Instead I'm thinking about sex.

I'm taking the easy way out and picking the scene in BODY HEAT where William Hurt circles the house, rabid with desire for Turner, finally getting inside.

Perhaps you have a more obscure or subtle rendering the act.

My Life at the Theater: Angels in America, Part One

We saw this in 1995 at the Abbley Theater in Dublin. Quite a treat and Megan was with us. It is a sad play, of course, complex and interestingly staged. I never saw Part 2 until the mini series.
The biggest thrill, of course, was being in the famous theater.