Celebrity Writers

Do you know who this is?

 

   He's a celebrity author. He is one of the "world’s bestselling and critically acclaimed thriller writers" according to the publisher Simon and Schuster who's coming out with an anthology of stories from 23 thriller authors next year.

 

   Admittedly my sense of celebrity seems not to fit that of our general society. I have little interest in athletes or entertainers. Though I can admire the feats of a Michael Jordan or a Maggie Smith, I can't say that I would go out of my way to sit next to them at dinner. Though to be at table where they sat next to each other might be interesting.

 

   Celebrity writers, on the other hand, I would go out of my way to sit next to at dinner or at the same table or in the same hall. Wouldn't it be grand to listen to Ken Follett and hear him say in person that he did not sell his first novel nor indeed, his tenth? If he who has written so many good books and been so often published did not sell his first one then there is hope for me. And J.K. Rowling whose Harry Potter series was rejected by umpteen publishing houses before Scholastic picked it up, then my Rafael Sirocco series has a chance.

 

   Okay, for those two celebrities, it's more about me.

 

   Sometimes my admiration is for writers who have lived through and written about history that I'm interested in. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s novels are among the best in American fiction, but for me his celebrity status comes from his own life experiences. He was a World War II prisoner of war held in Dresden, Germany, during the Allies' bombing and subsequent firestorm there. Later, his work with PEN International to focus attention on the plight of writers being persecuted in their own countries.

 

   Maya Angelou is in this same category of celebrity writers because of whom she had known--from famous leaders in our country's civil rights movement to unknowns in that same struggle. I get a thrill every time I drive through Stamps, Arkansas, because I know she lived there as a child.

 

   Then there are some of my favorite authors--John Irving, Robert Jordan, John Lescroart (That's his photo, by the way.) Diane Mott Davidson, Donna Leon, Patrick O'Brien. These are the writers I come back to time and again. Not because they feel like celebrities to me. I'm not even particularly interested in meeting them. It's their characters that I would like to spend time with, talk to, or just admire in person.

 

   I would like to know:

 

   John Wheelwright, best friend to John Irving's Owen Meany, from A Prayer for Owen Meany my favorite novel. It's about growing up. It's about friendship. It's about living with disability and mortality.

 

    Egwene, the country girl who becomes the head of the greatest institution in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time world. She is only one of literally a world of characters with whom I would gladly spend time. Well, all except the truly scary villains and terrifying creatures. Those can stay on the pages of the book.

 

   Dismas Hardy and Abe Glitsky and their families from John Lescroart's San Francisco based crime novels. Beginning with the first of these novels we meet these people and follow them as they build their lives together. Maybe we could all meet at Lou the Greek's for lunch.

 

   Goldie Bear from Diane Mott Davidson's culinary mysteries. We follow Goldie and her best friend (who happens to share the same abusive ex-husband whom they both refer to as 'the jerk') and Goldie's son as they get involved in murder mystery after murder mystery. Goldie does meet and marry a Colorado, sheriff's detective named Schultz. Nice man. Nice country, since that's where I live. Goldie is a caterer so naturally there are recipes included, most of which I've tried in my own kitchen.

 

   Commissario Guido Brunetti from Donna Leon's murder mysteries set in Venice, Italy. This  policeman knows the vicissitudes of the Italian justice system but works to solve crimes and bring the bad guys to some kind of reckoning anyway. He loves and respects his wife. The stories don't always have an ending that satisfies my just-desserts sensibilities, but they feel real and I understand Brunetti's cynicism. Couldn't we have a great discussion about right and wrong?

 

   Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey from Master and Commander and the other books in this series that follow the British navalman through the Napoleonic wars. And let me just say Jack was hot in the books before the movie folk cast Russell Crowe to play him in the movie version. I might even flirt a bit.

Three Writing Styles

STYLES of Writing SOUNDS & Silence

I have always read a wide variety of material, generally with little discrimination. I was as happy with David McCullough’s histories as with Colleen McCullough’s historical fiction. I eagerly read Charles Dickens and J. K. Rowling. Margaret Atwood and John Lescroart both kept me on tenterhooks.

Now that I, too, write, I am no more choosy about my reading, but I am more analytical. This summer I went from Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, a naval novel set in the early 1800’s. To a repeat reading of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, Volume One of his epic fantasy The Wheel of Time. To Cormack McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, the first in his Borderland Trilogy. Three very different ways to present sound and silence.

From O’Brian this excerpt:

‘Why does he not fire?’ thought Jack. The Desaix’s bow-chasers had been silent these twenty minutes. Indeed, by now she was in musket-shot, and the people in her bows could easily be told from one another: seamen, marines, officers—one man had a wooden leg. ‘By God, he’s going to riddle us with grape.’
…the Desaix began to yaw. She answered her helm as quickly as a cutter, and in three heartbeats there were her thirty-seven guns coming round to bear. The broadside’s roar and the fall of the Sophie’s main top gallant mast and fore topsail yard came almost together—in the thunder a hail of blocks, odd lengths of rope, splinters, the tremendous clang of a grape-shot striking the Sophie’s bell; and then a silence.

And from Jordan:

The back door creaked as someone outside, or something, tried to push it open. His mouth went dry. A crash shook the door in its frame and lent him speed; he slipped through the window like a hare going to ground, and cowered against the side of the house. Inside the room, wood splintered like thunder.

At first when the trees surrounded him, he took comfort from them. They helped hide him from Whatever the creatures were that had attacked the farm. As he crept through the woods, though, moon shadows shifted, and it began to seem as if the darkness of the forest changed and moved, too. Trees loomed malevolently; branches writhed toward him. He could almost hear the growling chuckles stifled in their throats while they waited for him. The howls of Tam’s pursuers no longer filled the night, but in the silence that replaced them he flinched every time the wind scraped one limb against another. He  hardly dared to breathe for fear he might be heard.

Then I read McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.

Rawlins stood in the door of the kitchen and studied him.
You look like you been rode hard and put up wet, he said.
They sat at the table and ate. Rawlins leaned back and fished his tobacco out of his shirtpocket.

I keep waitin for you to unload your wagon, he said. I got to go to work here in a few minutes.

I just come up to see you.

What about.

It don’t have to be about something does it?

No. Dont have to. He popped a match on the underside of the table and lit his cigarette and shook out the match and put it in his plate.

I hope you know what you’re doin, he said.

John Grady drained the last of his coffee and put the cup on his plate along with the silver. He got his hat from the bench beside him and put it on and stood up to take his dishes to the sink.

Rawlins watched him go to the sink and watched him go to the door. He thought he might turn and say something else but he didn’t.

It was not the absence of an apostrophe here and there that most affected me about McCarthy’s work. Having just read O’Brian’s decorous and abundant language describing sea battles in the Napoleonic Wars with their hundreds of men crowded on ships amid smoke and thunderous cannon fire, I then read Jordan’s graphic descriptions of combat with fantastical, ravening creatures in a world where silence and darkness battered me as harshly as the sounds of raging battles.

And finally I read McCarthy, with whom I was unfamiliar. My reaction to the change in styles was sensory. I felt as if I had been struck partially deaf. He wrote a world where sounds and people are as spare and sparse as the nearly barren dry lands of the West Texas-Mexico borderlands. McCarthy led me through hot, open country, with few people and them slow to speak their few words. A country of far distances and vast silences.

Three very different writers using words printed on paper to build worlds of sounds and silences in my head.

Blog Hop

Thanks to Grace Wagner for tagging me.

1:  What is the working title of your book?
Murder on Ceres

2: Where did the idea come from for the book?
My favorite genres are mystery and science fiction. Diane Mott Davidson’s mysteries were my especial favorites. Her characters are believable and engaging. Her violence is done almost gently. For science fiction, I am drawn to Isaac Asimov. He provides believable, thought-provoking science.
I wanted to present humans as I think they are likely to be no matter the technological advances of the future. I want my characters to be accepted as real people by the reader. And I want my characters to realistically live in what is to them the normal universe.

3: What genre does your book come under?
Murder on Ceres is a natural cross-over, a traditional mystery set in the future.

4: Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I’ve never thought of my characters as being like this or that actor. I will leave that up to the movie people, should it ever come to that.
No doubt, Rafe as the hero will be young and handsome; Terren as his wife will be tall and beautiful; Joe, the sidekick, will be older and ruggedly attractive. Mark, the antagonist, will be mature and charming. TePaki, the pirate will be tattooed and threatening.

5: What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
In a time when Mars is the center of humanity and Earth is literally the Old World, humans will still be humans and murder happens.

6: Is your book self-published, published by an independent publisher, or represented by an agent?
I am seeking an agent.

7: How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Almost three years.

8: What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End successfully marries science and character. His people seem perfectly normal and live normally in their very different world.

9: Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Carl Sagan is the who. “Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.” – Cosmos
I believe out-migration from Earth is the inevitable and necessary next step for our species.

10: What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Our hero must solve a murder and bring the murderer or murderers to justice. He must survive professional and personal disasters, some natural and some man-made, from the lovely pearl that is the asteroid Ceres through the vastness of space to the beautiful blue marble that is Earth.

Tagging more Writers:
This I cannot do without permission. So if you are interested in joining in, give me a shout and we’ll do it.

Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing

Joss Whedon is to Shakespeare as Russell Crowe is to musical villainy.  They’re both good. The latter does Javert with brute force, and he can sing. The former plays Much Ado About Nothing with agility and slapstick and only a little bit of song.

I think Wm. S. would be pleased with Whedon’s take on Much Ado. He used the bard’s original language. Albeit almost an hour short of using all the words. Probably a nod to saving money and not over-taxing our modern audience’s ubiquitous short attention span. Little is lost in this condensed version. You do have to adjust to listening as well as looking. We have become so used to being assaulted by the sights and sounds of so many of our movies that we automatically tune out the overload. In this film you do not want to tune anything out. Much of the humor and the sorrow is in the dialogue and you don’t want to miss it.

The best part about that original language is that Whedon had them speak the words sensibly and normally as though they would be understandable to our modern ears rather than to pontificate because they were written by the great and glorious Bard of Avon. And by so doing, our modern ear had no trouble understanding them. There aren't even any British accents.

Doing the film in black and white was a surprise. Surely the play was originally done live and in full-color.

In fact, Shakespeare was originally pop culture in an age when they had bull-baiting and bear-baiting in the same theater on the off-nights. For the play nights they just put sand and sawdust over the blood and gore and sold tickets to all and sundry, the great unwashed as well as the landed gentry. Actually, in old Bill’s time, pretty much everyone was unwashed. So it was probably produced live, in color, and full-scented.

I am pleased to say that I enjoyed Whedon’s film production amid the scent of popcorn.

Although this Much Ado is set in today’s world with today’s fashions and conveniences, it retains the mores of turn of the century England. That’s the 17^th Century.

Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, sets out to orchestrate the lives of his subjects. He will arrange the marriage of young adherent Claudio to ingénue Hero. And hook-up his old friend Benedict, a dedicated misogynist, with Benedict’s long-time antagonist Beatrice.

Although the young couple are ostensibly the lead roles, it is the wit wielded now like cudgels and then like rapiers by Beatrice and Benedict that make this play my favorite of Shakespeare’s comedies.

The prince’s evil brother Don John nearly destroys the young people’s lives. It is here that the serious intolerance of Shakespeare’s time comes to the fore.

But Don John is only a very small part. Shakespeare was a master of making the dark, darker by flashing a beam of light in the form of broad humor. Here he uses Don John’s henchmen to set in motion what is my favorite scene in the movie. They are interrogated by the prince’s security team lead by that bumbling-cop character Dogberry played to perfection by Nathan Fillian.

Put away the dusty teachings of that old high school English teacher and go see this production. Shakespeare’s plays were never intended to be read piece-meal and badly in high school classrooms. They were not intended to be read at all. Who reads Harold Pinter or Neil Simon? Plays are for watching. On the screen or on the stage.

Hands

Prompt:  Begin a story describing only two hands. Use the physical characteristics of the hands, as well as any relevant activity or movement, gesture, fidgeting, and so on, to reveal who the hands belong to.

“I don’t know what’s wrong.” She held her hands palms up, helpless.

“When did it start?” His right hand hesitated over the keyboard.

She touched her slender index finger to her pursed lips, thinking. Her fingernails, well-tended and cut short, shone the palest pink in the florescent light. “It’s worse now.”

He keyed her answer into the computer, the nail on his ring finger chipped and discolored.

She covered her eyes with her left hand. “I can’t keep going like this.” No wedding band, no adornment at all. The skin smooth, well past the dimples of childhood but not yet bereft of the tissue that precludes wrinkles.

He rested his hand on the counter. His sun-browned skin as free of jewelry as hers. He made notes. “Can you describe the sound you heard?”

“A terrible screeching noise.” She clenched both fists and drew her shoulders toward her ears remembering.

“Could you tell where it was coming from?” He touched the keys, his delicate movements at odds with his beefy hands, the broad pads of his fingers.

“No. It was dark and . . . .” Her hand fluttered above the counter, fingers gracefully curved. “I was alone and . . . .”

He covered her hand with his own for the briefest of moments, reassuring her.

“Not to worry. It’s probably the fan belt.”

To see my daughter's response to this prompt cllick  http://sinandinconvenience.blogspot.com/2013/07/writing-prompt-only-two-hands.html

Fantasy Series

Cover Art from Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World

I remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard about the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, President Kennedy’s murder in 1963, Senator Kennedy’s murder in 1968, the Edmond Post Office murders in 1986, the Murrah Federal Building Bombing in 1995, and 9/11 in 2001. Having grown up and lived most of my life in the Oklahoma City area, the Edmond Post Office and Murrah Building were parts of my daily life. I passed the post office on my way to work each morning and our credit union was in the Murrah Building. Each of these events shook my world, shifted my world view.

And then one day in September 2007, I was driving north on I-35 with my daughter, then a Freshman at Oklahoma University. The car radio was tuned to KGOU our Public Radio Station. Suddenly my daughter started screaming and beating on the dashboard. When she told me why, it made no sense. Some writer named Robert Jordan died. I had no idea who Robert Jordan was. She explained about his epic fantasy series. His unfinished epic fantasy series, eleven volumes of which she had read and loved and reread in anticipation of the final installment.

Being naturally commitment-averse, I made it a rule never to read serialized novels. Nonfiction in multiple volumes I’ve always been comfortable with. Who can cover the Civil War in a single volume?

Fantasy? Also, not happening. I don’t easily suspend disbelief, so the minute something supernatural comes on the scene, my mind begins to wander and the book languishes beside my bed or under it.

And I never reread works of fiction. There are too many good books out there and I don’t have enough time to read them all as it is.

There were noteworthy exceptions to my policies of no fantasy series and single read-throughs. Tolkien’s Trilogy of the Rings, which I read to please a husband. I still have the books, but not that husband. And Rowling’s seven-book Harry Potter series which I read to please my daughter. Happily I still have both the books and the daughter.

Jordan, however, was not a blip on any radar as far as I was concerned. And as of the day of his death, never would be.

Today I am one-third of the way through Eye of the World, the first in what was to become Jordan’s fourteen-book series The Wheel of Time. The final three volumes were written by Brandon Sanderson. And this will be my third time through the series from beginning to end. Plus rereads of the later volumes in anticipation of each new release.

Why The Wheel of Time? To be honest, I thought I’d never enjoy another fantasy after The Lord of the Rings. I tried a couple and was not impressed.

I believed Tolkien’s world, complete with his Orcs and Ents. Then I came to believe Rowling’s world and Jordan’s, with their Hogwarts and Quiddich and Aes Sedai and Tarmon Gai'don. In each and every one of these books, characters from unremarkable backgrounds lead their people against the forces of darkness and win. Characters I got to know and care about, thrown into intolerable situations, attempting impossible goals, and succeeding.

Some days, my real world feels threatened by darkness on an epic scale and I need to believe there are real people from whatever backgrounds who can and will stand up when we need them.

Writing Prompt: My favorite song

Last year my daughter Grace and I each got a copy of this book. A wonderful way to practice writing. We choose a prompt, write, then read them aloud. There's a link at the end of this post to Grace's story. See how she responded to the prompt.

Prompt:  Write a story based on the title of your favorite song.

I’ve missed you. It’s been a long time. Probably seems longer than it’s really been, but long enough.

When you left, it was supposed to be just for a while. A week. Two at the most. But then things happened. There was a baby and your grandfather died. I understand all that.

But then it seemed you might not want to come home.

I got called away, too. Then I was busy and didn’t think about the separation. That’s what I’ve started calling it—the separation.

When I get home now, the house seems empty. Like it’s been empty a long time. It doesn’t smell like you anymore. Your minty Altoids, fresh brewed coffee, a hint of tobacco smoke. Your deodorant.

Today I went in to the office at the regular time, but couldn’t face coming home again. Worked over. Stopped for a drink. Went to the movies. Late. Very late.

I came home to a dark living room. Lights flickered toward the back of the house. In the kitchen.

Candles.  

And flowers.

And you singing, “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear…”

To see what Grace wrote using this same prompt go to   http://sinandinconvenience.blogspot.com/