The Case Of The Phantom Pisser

Today, I'm cheating a bit, but in a good cause.

The past couple of weeks have been very tight, and as some of you mentioned, last Wednesday's post was not quite up to snuff. I expect to be back to full operation by next week.

Yesterday was my turn to post on the Poisoned Pen Press Blog, and somehow, that piece turned out to be the post I've most enjoyed writing, ever. I hope you'll have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.
http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/the-case-of-the-phantom-pisser/

Consider adding the Poisoned Pen Press Blog to your regular reading list. You'll get some very interesting thoughts from a bunch of damn good writers. http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/category/blog/

A Wakeup Call

I spent this past weekend at the West Coast Ragtime Festival in Sacramento. Three days of ragtime and early jazz, from 9am (no, I didn't come in quite that early) till 11 at night (yes, I did stay that late), with informational seminars, and the opportunity to sit down with friends I see face-to-face only once or twice a year. That Festival has always been a major refresher, a transfusion of energy. Everything upbeat.

But this year was different.

I hadn't been there ten minutes when I ran into a dear friend, and learned that her long-dormant cancer had reawakened. Then, not five minutes after chatting with her, I greeted another very good friend, only to learn she'd recently had the worst kind of diagnosis, and this was going to be her last Festival.

Bummer. All day Friday and well into Saturday, I listened to the music, but I wasn't really tuned in. I started to wonder whether I'd gotten a wakeup call.

A couple of weeks ago, I debated myself in my blog post as to whether I should go ahead with my next mystery novel, or organize, edit, and write up the historical papers I'd acquired from the estate of Brun Campbell, the original Ragtime Kid. Brun desperately wanted to get his history of ragtime published, but he never did. Surrounded by ragtime at the Festival, I asked myself what difference one mystery novel more or less would make, when I could be Brun's second chance.

Brun and I had developed a nice relationship during the five years I'd employed him as protagonist of THE RAGTIME KID and THE RAGTIME FOOL, and given that the old piano man was quite the storyteller himself, I thought I was well-qualified to spruce up his notes and tell his story. Be tough to let an old friend down, especially one as engaging and insistent as Brun.

A passage from COMING INTO THE END ZONE, a memoir by the novelist Doris Grumbach, came into my mind. Ms. Grumbach wrote the book during the year she turned seventy, and it was in large part a compendium of indignation at the nasty stuff old age dumps on people, including the realization of how close one's personal horizon has drawn. The author remembered a friend who said she "thinks we die only when our work is done. I would like to think that is true. I have work still to do." When I googled Doris Grumbach, I was gratified - and amused - to find she is still alive, twenty-three years later and counting, and has written several more books.

Ms. Grumbach's friend could be right, but I suspect she's got it backward. More likely, when we die, our work is done. But either way, the bottom line is the same: Focus on what's at hand, and let the horizon lie where it will. It just might be twenty-three years out there. And if it's twenty-three hours, what are you going to do about it?

By late Saturday I found myself tuning into the music much better, though admittedly not quite as well as at past Festivals. Maybe next year I'll be back to form. And I'll be interested to see what I'm working on then...Lord willin' and the creek don't rise.

When Fiction Comes Up Against Reality

For the past few months, I've been doing work that would have to rank at the top of any list of interesting activities for a historical novelist. After writing two books (THE RAGTIME KID and THE RAGTIME FOOL), which featured Sanford Brunson Campbell, the "Original Ragtime Kid of the 1890s" as protagonist, I was lucky enough to obtain three big boxes of items that once belonged to the real-life Kid, who died in 1952.

Imagine my feelings, reading autobiographical manuscripts describing Brun's adventures as an itinerant ragtime pianist during the first decade of the twentieth century, and his efforts during the last decade of his life to revive ragtime music and the reputation of his hero, Scott Joplin. There were also musical compositions unknown to current ragtime enthusiasts, 78rpm recordings of Brun playing his and Joplin's music, personal effects (including his barber's razor strop), business and tax records, and extensive correspondence with prominent musicians, entertainment figures, and politicians.

Brun was known as someone who never let facts get in the way of a good story - no wonder he was such a compelling figure to an historical novelist - and so, some of his written material was contradicted by well-established information. I think what inspired Brun to tell many of his tall tales was the desire to bring Joplin the recognition Brun (rightly) thought his old piano teacher deserved. As my Brun put it in THE RAGTIME FOOL, "Well, the way I told it, that's what Mr. Joplin deserved...That's how it should've been."

Brun did tell some good stories, and told them well. He had a very engaging voice. After five years wandering through the midwest, playing bar-room piano, he decided to go home to Arkansas City, KS, to visit his high-school sweetheart. "While I had been away," Brun wrote, "the local gossips had told her all kinds of stories about me and my ragtime career, the places in which I had played and other poisonous gossip. Some of it was true..."

"I arrived dressed in a loud checkered suit; cloth-top, colored patent leather shoes with pearl buttons, a light-colored hat with a loud hatband around it, and that ever-loving loud silk shirt, together with the loud-patterned necktie, about made my ragtime dress complete. When the natives saw me in that getup, I created quite a sensation.

"I thought my girl would faint when she gave me the once-over, and my mother stood dead in her tracks when she saw my loud clothes. But I was her darling boy and my appearance was soon forgotten by her."

I was pleased and not a little surprised to see how well my fictional Brun fit with his historical profile. But now, what? Some sort of nonfiction book needs to come out of this material, probably with a CD of a ragtime pianist playing Brun's newly-discovered music, as well as transcriptions from Brun's recordings. It'll take some time, especially having to fit the work in as I write my next mystery, and probably the one after that. But it's got to be done. It tickles me that the story of the story-telling man who worked so hard on Scott Joplin's behalf now falls to another story-teller. Gonna be a challenge to sort out what's reality in Brun's accounts, and what's fiction.

Literary Sunsets

Readers tell me they think the single most important aspect of a book is the ending. A woman at a Left Coast Crime Convention said, "If the author doesn't get the ending just right, it doesn't matter how good the rest of the book was. It's still ruined for me."

So I work hard at my endings. No exaggeration to say I rewrite them fifty, seventy-five, a hundred times. I may change the whole thing, or just one word. I may reinstate an earlier version, then go back to a different earlier version. I move phrases and sentences around. Square One and I get to know each other very well.

The moral and ethical questions in my upcoming book, A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, are complex, and I struggled to bring the action to a...no, to the proper close. I've never put more effort into the final chapter of a book. As I worked late one afternoon, adding, deleting, revising, I glanced out the window into the sunset. It had been a typical Seattle January day, cloudy, drizzly, damp. In a word, bleak. I was anticipating one of those typical January sunsets, where the sun, absent all day, would go down without notice, leaving us to the gathering darkness. Like the last page of a Patricia Highsmith novel.

But just as the sun approached the horizon, it broke through the clouds and lit the sky, forming a magnificent pattern of brilliant orange and lustrous salmon-pink over ever-shifting streaks of gray. That brief blaze seemed to redeem the whole dreary day. Much more impressive, even, than those sunsets in July, when the flaming sun suddenly drops out of a cloudless sky to vanish behind the Olympic Mountains. All's well that ends well. Like the final number of a stage musical.

A low-note Highsmith ending wouldn't do, I thought. Not for A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, and probably not for any book I'd write. But neither would a stage-musical finale ring true for this story. My protagonist had done seriously wrong (if at least partially for good reasons), and he couldn't march, smiling, out of the novel. There would be sunshine at the end, but it would need to be filtered through carefully-laid out cloud cover, just so, such that when readers would close the back cover of the book, they'd smile, and say, "Yeah."

I think I finally got it right. I hope I did.

Playing The Name Game

Naming characters is not always easy. You never can be sure you've got it right.

In one of my earlier books, I'd slapped the moniker Dennis onto a character, and the howl out of my editor could have been heard in Zanzibar. "That's a very strong character," she snapped. "A Dennis would be a wimp." I'd never imagined Dennises as being at all wimpish, so I ran the matter past my wife. She shook her head. "I'd think of someone wishy-washy if I read 'Dennis,'" she said. I shrugged, and Dennis became Will, which satisfied both editor and wife.

The biggest snafu I ever got into over a character name came out of SCAMMING THE BIRDMAN, my second mystery novel, a caper. I'd seen a faded painted ad, probably from the '30s, on a brick building beside the Alaskan Way Viaduct here in Seattle. It advertised a meat company named LoPriore brothers. The villain in STB was definitely arch, the nastiest person I've ever invented. Right off, Vincent LoPriore struck me as the perfect name for him. It seemed to ooze menace.

So imagine my surprise one day, after the book came out, when I opened my email and in my inbox saw I had a message from Vincent LoPriore. I could not bring myself to open it until I'd finished dealing with all the other messages, and when I opened the scary email, I found it was from a man named, yes, Vincent LoPriore, who lived in Pennsylvania. Someone had seen a synopsis of my book on the web, and called it to his attention. He asked where I'd gotten the name from, so I told him, said I hoped he wouldn't be upset, and that I hadn't imagined there was any real person anywhere named Vincent LoPriore. Fortunately, he thought the whole thing was very funny, and said he liked being cast as the bad guy in a murder mystery. So I sent him a signed book, and that settled the matter.

Just in case you think you ever have all bases covered in this game.

Buy This Book!

Today, I finished reading galleys for A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, my December release from Poisoned Pen Press. That's the last step in writing the book.

And now comes the promotional work, nothing new and different. Read "Building the Brand," by Tony Perrottet, in the May 1 edition of the New York Times Book Review.

I'm not a salesman by nature. For a while, my wife, daughter and I ran a sideline business in antiques, and I had real trouble when it came time to convince a potential buyer he or she couldn't live without a particular item on our shelves. It was near-routine for one of my associates to tell me to please go take a nice walk around the show, and stay out of their way.

Maybe if I work at it, though, I could become one of those awful shills on the radio. Say, the hard-sell guy: "How much longer are you going to put up with those mystery novels that sink you into a coma after fifty pages? Are you masochistic or something? You owe it to yourself to buy A PERILOUS CONCEPTION. I challenge you! Act in the next sixty seconds, and you can pre-order it from amazon for $16.47, a saving of a full third over the suggested retail price of $24.95."

Or, how about the bird who preys on the need to keep up with the Joneses? "You're having a wonderful day – everything's gone right for you...until you pull up a chair at Happy Hour, and your girlfriend says, 'What do you think of A PERILOUS CONCEPTION? Is that Pulitzer material, or what?' Can you picture her face - never mind the suddenly-empty chair beside you - when you have to admit you haven't read it?"

Then, there's the slime-throated creep who wants us all to go down and talk to his friend...no, his good friend, who you can trust, at the car dealership, the mattress store, or the wellness emporium. "You need to go down and see my friends, the good folks at Seattle Mystery Bookshop. You can trust them to fix you up right with a copy of the very book you simply have to read. I'm talking about A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, the ultimate Seattle-based mystery." Hmm. The staff at SMB really are my friends, and you really can trust them to fix you up with just the right book for your reading taste. (Ignore the final sentence in that palaver, and we've got a first in radio advertising).

Best of all, I think, is the testimonial. "I'm here with Ophelia Waye, prominent reader of mystery novels. Ophelia, tell me, how has reading A PERILOUS CONCEPTION changed your life?" "Well, it's a revelation, Larry, nothing less. For more than ten years now, I've been reading two, sometimes three, mystery novels a day, and never felt satisfied. I just had to read more and more of those darned books. But A PERILOUS CONCEPTION cured my compulsion. I'll never read another mystery. Now, I spend fourteen hours a day watching television. My husband noticed the difference immediately, and I couldn't be happier."

You Gotta Have Heart

Our Seattle Mariners started their baseball season with two wins, then lost seven games in a row, and fell behind 7-0 in their next game. Fans and sportswriters agreed - might as well call off the season. This team is going nowhere, certainly not to the playoffs. We're looking at a summer of pain and frustration.

But I remember the best baseball season ever, 1951. My New York Giants lost eleven games in a row out of the gate, and started the year 2-12. Things looked so bad, they called up a young outfielder named Willie Mays. After 20 at-bats, Willie had one hit, a batting average of .050. On August 11, the Giants were thirteen games behind the hated Brooklyn Dodgers, and Chuck Dressen, the Dodgers' manager told reporters, "The Giants is dead."

Not quite. The Jints ran off a sixteen-game win streak, caught the Dodgers during the last weekend of the regular season, then won the pennant in a playoff, when Bobby Thomson hit the most famous home run in the history of the game. That team had heart. Miles and miles and miles of heart.

What's that got to do with writing? Writers gotta have heart, too. So many ink-slingers become instant successes only following years of frustration, having doggedly refused to give up even when everything and everyone seemed to be telling them that would be the reasonable move.

After some thirty years of trying and failing to write a novel and get it published, I left my day job to go at book-writing full time. Three years of scribbling produced a novel and twenty-odd rejection slips. Then, a writer-friend volunteered to give my book a once-over. He told me my voice was great - for nonfiction - and suggested I rewrite the book "as if you're telling someone a story, for crying out loud." I listened to my batting coach, spent a half-year adjusting my stance, then hit it out of the park. The first publisher who saw the reworked book bought it, and it became THE MUSIC BOX MURDERS, my first published mystery novel. My eighth, A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, will come out this December. That's twelve years in the majors for me, and if I've never made an All-Star team, it's OK. I just love to play the game.

And oh yeah. The Mariners scored one run in the seventh inning, five in the eighth, and two more in the ninth to win that game. No, they probably won't make it to the postseason, but all right. I'll cheer them on through the summer anyway. They've got heart.

A Novelist's Research Near-Disaster

I closed last week's blog with a research adventure from when I was writing THE RAGTIME KID. Here's one from THE RAGTIME FOOL.

Not a spoiler - the first chapter of TRF reveals the plan of a bunch of Klansmen to blow up a high school in Sedalia, MO during a racially-integrated ceremony to honor Scott Joplin. Since what I knew about explosives would have rattled around inside a watch case, I set out to get information. I learned a good bit about dynamite, but couldn't quite get my head around the specific protocol for its use in bringing down a building.

That summer, I went to Canada to visit my friend Jim, in Sechelt, on BC's Sunshine Coast. We went to lunch with Jim's friend, Ralph, and as I looked around the room, I realized the construction was similar to that of Sedalia's old Hubbard High School. We were sitting in the lower level of a two-story building, the ceiling above us being supported by a large horizontal beam that ran the length of the room. That beam in turn was held in place by two stout vertical wooden beams.

And Ralph was a contractor!

"Tell me something," I said to him. "If you wanted to blow up this building with dynamite, exactly how would you go about it?"

Ralph turned to Jim, who waved aside his concern. "He's a writer," Jim said. "He's probably doing a story. Go ahead and tell him what he wants to know."

So, as Ralph gave me detailed step-by-step directions, I took them down in the little pocket notepad I always carry. When he finished, I thanked him, and told him I'd send him a copy of the book.

Two days later, on my way home, it was only as I was next in line for the customs inspector that I realized I was carrying in my shirt pocket a pad whose first page was titled, "How to blow up Hubbard High School." All of a sudden, air-conditioned car or not, I was sweating profusely. Too late to turn back. It occurred to me that I might tear out the page and swallow it, but I thought no, I'm probably on camera right now. They'd lock me up and pass a tube down one end or up the other. Bad idea.

The inspector waved me forward. Since I'm not a praying man, all I could do was hope. Fortunately, he just asked me a couple of quick questions about purchases, then waved me through. Lesson learned. Next time, information like that gets to my house by mail, snail or e-.

A DOUBLEHEADER: Me And Connie Mack, and Follow This Blog

Having turned in the manuscript for A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, my upcoming mystery novel, people ask what I'm doing now. When I tell them I'm starting on the next book, most of them look like they don't quite get it. One questioner straight-out asked me why. I guess I must have looked like I didn't quite get it, because he added, "You've had ten books published - isn't that enough?"

This week, baseball players began to report for spring training, the annual season of optimism and hope, and in the vehicle of my acquaintance's question, I traveled back in my mind to the spring of 1951, when I was very young and even more impressionable. For the first time in its fifty-year history, the Philadelphia Athletics were going to have a manager not named Connie Mack. During that spring-training session, an east-coast sportswriter wrote a retrospective on Mr. Mack's career, a half-century of some of the highest highs and the lowest lows in the ongoing story of the national pastime. The writer commented to the effect that he'd been asking the elderly manager for some years whether he was ready to retire. But Old Mr. Mack, the reporter wrote, would get a far-away look in his eyes, smile a little, shake his head, and say, "Just one more season."

When Connie Mack finally did throw in the towel at age 87, it was after a dreadful 1950 campaign in which the Athletics lost 102 games and finished dead last in the American League. Probably not the leave-taking the old man had envisioned. But should he have left the dugout after his 1931 AL pennant, walked away on top, and spent those twenty years in uneasy and regretful leisure? As a twelve-year-old kid, I didn't think so. I knew even then that for Connie Mack, baseball was not a pastime. It was his life. I had to admire the guy.

Just one more book.

* * * * *

Would you like to have Larry's weekly blogs delivered to your email inbox? Just click on the FOLLOW button at the top right of the screen, register, and Bob's your uncle.

Porky, The King, and Me - A Perilous Conception

When I was a young boy, I had a crippling stutter. My mother used to tell me, well, all right, the King of England stutters too. My reaction was along the lines of "fat lot of good that does me, when I have to go out tomorrow and listen to people finish my sentences, or worse, tell me, 'Spit it out. Just spit it out!'" And then, there were the omnipresent flocks of mocking birds: "What's the m-m-matter, L-L-L-Larry? C-c-can't you t-t-talk? You s-s-s-sound like P-P-P-Porky P-P-P-Pig."

So the movie, "The King's Speech," was a revelation for me, an intense two hours of slam-dunk empathy. King George VI's childhood stuttering history and mine were carbon copies, and when that poor guy grew up, he had to get behind a microphone and talk to millions of people by radio, sometimes while staring at hundreds of anxious faces in a live audience. Talk about blood running cold. My fingers were like ice.

But I got to apply a lesson from the King and Mr. Logue, his speech therapist. Last Thursday, I gave a talk to a group about my ragtime mysteries, and afterward, someone asked what my next book was going to be. "It's about an overly-ambitious obstetrician in 1977, racing to become the first physician to develop a baby by in vitro fertilization," I said. "But there are complications that lead to blackmail and murder."

Then someone asked me the title. My whole body tensed. "A P-p...A P-p-p-" I said, and froze.

The woman's face twisted into concern. How the hell could I have been so stupid, putting a word beginning with a hard P into my title? Now I was going to have to try to spit that out for months of promotional appearances.

Then I thought of the King, giving his critical speech at the conclusion of the movie, and Mr. Logue, like an orchestra conductor, coaching him along. "Slip in an 'ah' and ride it through," Logue whispered, as the King approached a stumbling block. My throat relaxed. "Ahp-erilous Conception," I said.

The woman's eyes widened. "A Perilous Conception" - that sounds intriguing."

Logue's face beamed pleasure. The King smiled.

A PERILOUS CONCEPTION - Mission Accomplished?

Carrying on from last week's post, the manuscript for my next book is finished and submitted. "Just" went from 399 occurrences to 168, "grin" from 84 to 25.

Now, there remains only to respond to recommendations from the editor, copy-edit the galleys, fill out the publisher's Author Questionnaire, and then plan promotions. Sending in a manuscript doesn't mean the book is finished.

A while back, in the middle of a promotional tour, this bit of doggerel came to me, apologies to Stephen Foster and Susanna:

I come down from Minneap'lis like a bat straight out of hell,
'Long Thirty-five to Omaha, sure hope the books will sell.
Then out to Lawrence, Kansas, a quick session with the fans.
And catch a plane to Scottsdale, all those readers with their tans.
Promo touring! You fly, you drive, you run.
You write a book, you think you're through?
Oh, no - you've just begun.

Still, submitting the "final" manuscript does bring a sense of completion. Like many writers, I feel some sadness; it's been likened to postpartum depression. But it's leavened by the howling in my skull of the story that's been waiting its turn for some six months, and now damn well wants me to draw my deep breath and get with it. In addition, as you can see, there's all the stuff I've had to put aside (literally and figuratively) for the past month to get the manuscript finished on schedule. Just because no one's forcing me to do it doesn't mean writing novels is anything but a full-time job.

Oh yes, almost forgot. The title of the book is A PERILOUS CONCEPTION. Poisoned Pen Press will bring it out in December, 2011.

An Award Received, An Award Given

Bill Farley founded the Seattle Mystery Bookshop in 1990, and ever since has been one of the Pacific Northwest Mystery Community's leading citizens, always enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and helpful to readers and writers alike. Last month, the Northwest Chapter of Mystery Writers of America deservedly honored Bill with its Willo Award (named for mystery author Willo Davis Roberts), as a "member of the mystery community who has contributed with distinction to the Northwest mystery writing scene." Read all about it here.

So I'm proud to report that my book, THE RAGTIME FOOL, was included among "Bill's Best of 2010." Read about that here.

Rampant Redundancies in Rewriting

My favorite part of writing a novel is the rewrite, where plot tightens, characters emerge, and interesting stuff happens that I never foresaw.

But that final rewrite, directly ahead of the submission deadline - there's a challenge. That's where I am now with my current project. Reading the manuscript line by line, word for word, all kinds of terrible things pop up. The worst may be overworked words.

Something was 'okay' 87 times, one time more than 'maybe' appeared. There were 399 instances of 'just,' many of which I deleted, but sometimes that just wasn't possible. I also got rid of a bunch of the 162 appearances of 'well', most of them lazy sentence-starting interjections. People were urged to 'come on' 34 times. That could wear out in a hurry.

What really made me twitchy was the fact that 'a' popped up 2462 times; 'and', 2314; 'that', 1149; and 'the', 4118. In a manuscript of 100,000 words, then, those four words comprised ten percent of the verbiage. Makes me want to download a copy of "Moby Dick," do a total word count, then search for each of those four words.

Fictional vs. Nonfictional Voice

My good friend, Bob Resta, recently commented to me as follows:

"Your non-fiction is more relaxed than your fiction. Your fiction is highly thought out, carefully constructed, and meticulously chiseled out of a big hunk of rock. Your non-fiction is more like your feet are up at the end of the day, you're sipping a beer, and saying to the reader 'Hey - isn't this an interesting observation.' One is not necessarily better than the other, just different."

Bob was right. For nonfiction, I set up an outline, write a draft, revise it once, maybe twice, and there it is. Easy. For fiction, my characters pay no attention to any outline I give them, and I end up doing just what Bob said, chiseling away at that rock, first on a macro scale, then in finer and finer detail.

At first thought, that seems opposite to what I'd expect. Shouldn't a relaxed voice be well-suited to telling a story, and a more thoughtful voice be more appropriate to organizing a bunch of facts, theories, or legends for a reader? Not necessarily. In nonfiction, no one's there to mess around with your outline. Even a nonfictional person in the narrative is going to have trouble rebelling against a fact-based outline.

Fiction writers come in two basic groups: Outliners and Seat-of-The-Pantsers. Grabbing a beer, kicking back, and seeing what happens might work for those novelists who outline their stories, then watch, smiling, as their characters march nicely from Point A to The End. But "Seat-of-the-Pantsers" like me are probably condemned to a lifetime of hacking layer after layer off that godawful rock called a first draft that their characters drop on them.

Business Can Be A Pleasure

       Nice every now and again to combine business and pleasure. This past weekend, November 19-21, I was at the West Coast Ragtime Festival in Sacramento, a thoroughly enjoyable three days. I hadn't been in the building ten minutes when my friend Darwyn approached me with a chocolate bar in hand. When an event starts out like that, you know it's gonna be good.
       To dispose of the business first, the Ragtime Store sold a good number of signed copies of my three ragtime-based mysteries, some people buying all three of the trilogy. Nice.
      As to the music - I can say with truth that I've never attended a festival with better ragtime, as rendered by pianists, orchestras and small groups, string virtuosos, rhythm accompanists, and singers. To list all the terrific performers would take a whole page, but just to mention a few: the Ivory and Gold trio (pianist Jeff Barnhart, flutist Anne Barnhart, and drummer Danny Coots) were back for the first time in ten years, and infused the entire festival with their superb musicianship and great good humor. And pianist Larisa Migachyov's performance of Joseph Lamb's "Bohemia" rag was breathtakingly beautiful.
      The weather was wonderful, temperatures in the seventies and eighties, but of course there's always payback. I flew home in the midst of the big Seattle snowstorm; fortunately, son-in-law Peter Greyy, a Wisconsin native, was able to pick me up and get me home. Always better lucky than good.

There's A Message Here

When I left medical work nearly 16 years ago, I swore that none of my novels would have a medical background. Never. I had walked out a door and locked it behind me.

For three books set in the antiques subculture, I held to that resolve, but then I realized that a mainstream novel I'd written, but never gotten published, many years earlier would work very nicely as a mystery - but only if it had a medical background. By that time, I'd learned that what a story wants, a wise author gives it, so I went ahead and wrote FIRST, DO NO HARM, which to date has received the best reviews (including a starred review in Booklist) of any of my novels.

Never mind. I went on to write three books with ragtime backgrounds, then came up against the realization that my idea for the next book needed a medical background. So I'm just now finishing UNFINISHED BUSINESS (take that as you will). And just this afternoon, it hit me that my thoughts for the next couple of books demand...that's right. A medical background.

Write what you know, know what you write, write what you love, love what you write. Nah. Just write what comes, and don't think too hard about it.

Bad News, Good News

      The bad news is that it's past 10 o'clock on a Wednesday night, and I just realized I haven't written my weekly blog.
      The good news is that it happened because I got so wrapped up in my book-in-progress, I forgot about everything else.  
      For the better part of a year, now, Colin Sanford, a brilliant doctor, determined to produce the world's first in-vitro-fertilization baby, and Police Detective Bernie Baumgartner (Bernie the Bulldog), determined to sort out why people in Sanford's operation have ended up dead or missing, have been going back and forth on my computer in a cerebral life-and-death chess game. But this morning, all of a sudden, one of them spoke just the right words, and there they were, in Sanford's office, slugging away at each other like a couple of kids in a street fight. And when the fight was over, it all came to me. I saw who really were the good guys, and who were the bad, and how it was going to sort out. My working title for the book has been "Unfinished Business." Today, I saw why. I spent the rest of the day joyously scribbling notes that would take me to The End.
      And just now realized I hadn't written my blog. Well, there it is.  

A Break in the Action

That mystery guy from Seattle
Took a break from his fictional battle.
All that cop-and-crook strife
Said his spouse, "Get a life."
He'll be back in a week, all a-prattle.

Is Writing a Mystery Novel Painful?

      I've heard and read a goodly number of comments by writers about how painful a process writing is. They say that each day, as they begin a session, they're sure they'll never get a single word onto paper or screen, and if they do, that word and any others they manage to squeeze out will be terrible, unsalvageable. Then, when they finish a manuscript, they dread going back to start the next book. Facing a blank page reduces them to fidgets.
      I don't get it. I wake up every morning and can't wait to get to my computer and see what's going to happen. Does something big explode into prose every day? Not close. Is every piece of prose deathless? Hey, I live in Seattle; is every day a sunny day? But eventually, the sun always does burst through, and after an extended spell of nasty weather, that glow often seems wondrously brilliant.  
      Maybe personal history plays a role. My previous line of work involved looking after people with serious medical problems - talk about performance anxiety. The idea of a bad day on the job then was unthinkable. So if my characters decide to take a day off here and there, no problem. They're just trying to get themselves together. They'll shape up tomorrow.
      Maybe it's just that a person has to be a little off-center to willingly spend all day locked in a room with a bunch of imaginary people. But that's the key word: 'willingly.' No one's forcing me to go down to that writing room five mornings a week. If it weren't enjoyable, why on earth would I ever do it? 

The Big 70 Bash

Here's the writer, aided as always by wife Myra, about to cut the Fabulous Special-Order Chocolate Cake at his Big 70 Birthday Bash last Saturday evening. Thirty-some friends helped celebrate the  event, which featured a program of ragtime piano by Seattle legend Dan  Grinstead, and telling of snarky stories about the G. O. H. by his children and a few long-term friends. Emcee was son-in-law Peter Greyy, a standout Seattle-area standup comic.
Larry made the point that although Three-score and Ten is both the Biblical statute of limitations and the classic retirement age, he has no intention of heeding either injunction and intends to keep cranking out the mystery novels as long as mind and body hold out, and as long as son Casey continues his ready availability as Tech Support.