Taking a Break

In preparation for today’s post, I took a look back at my first one from when Wicked Writers launched in January. Back then, I had no idea what a blog even was. Five months in, and these weekly deadlines are a blast, in particular hearing from our beloved readers.

One of the goals I’d set back in January, though, was to land an agent this year and, in my rush to meet that deadline, I’ve been rushing myself into a tizzy. I haven’t had enough bandwidth for anything, least of all to relax and just enjoy the ride. Too often, I tell my kids, “right after this call” or “right after this deadline,” yet one of the main reasons I no longer work in an office is no, not all the oodles of money we’ve banked (not), but so I could devote more attention and energy to the little ones, first and foremost. They grow up too fast and I’m already feeling the bittersweet passage of time.

As well, blogging is a platform, and in the excitement of having one, I’ve suddenly spread myself in a multitude of directions, neglecting to keep in mind that the platform supports the product. So before I can realize my goal of landing an agent, some things need to change.

For one thing, I need to get organized and find my center. That means staying focused, stop making excuses, don’t try to do it all, and learn to enjoy some stillness. In the short run, that means taking a break from blogging. I know, not the end of anyone’s world, but it’s a shame to have to give up something I enjoy with a talented bunch of authors whom I admire. Much thanks to the Wicked Writers for allowing me the wonderful opportunity to blog with them this year. And to you readers for listening to what I had to say and sharing your own thoughts with me.

For now, I'll step back, finish polishing that manuscript and get those queries out. I'm not leaving cyberspace altogether. You can still find me on Facebook and occasionally on Twitter. I'd love to see you there. Stay in touch.

Guest Blogger: Crime Fiction Around the World

As the Wicked Writers make time to write this week, you may be looking for a good book to take along for this summer's vacation. Glenn Harper, founder of the International Noir Fiction blog and editor of Sculpture magazine, has a few juicy recommendations. He's a pro at mining the treasure trove of international crime fiction, and below, he offers up a sampling of a few of his current favorites. Browse through until you find your location of choice, or like me, pack a whole lot of books. Enjoy!

I read crime novels while I ride the Metro to and from work every day, about 30 minutes each way. The train passes through new suburbs, old suburbs, and warehouse districts, passes by a cement factory, empty buildings covered in graffiti, a graveyard of buses and trolleys, a brightly colored church dome, and the backs of run-down row houses before passing into a railyard and a tunnel and then underneath downtown Washington, D.C. What I'm reading, though, transports me instead to all the continents, to exotic cities and threatening slums. Along the way, crime fiction gives me insights into the daily lives of people I'll never meet who share something with the commuters surrounding me on the train but also possess experiences that are absolutely unique. They demonstrate that international crime novels offer much more than an escapist tour guide to cities around the world. The novels described below—drawn from the last six months of my blog reviews—vividly investigate the social and cultural realities of the character’s lives and their diverse social milieu (on every continent except Antarctica), as much as they investigate the crimes that are their ostensible subject.

South Africa: The compression of time and action in Deon Meyer's 13 Hours is so condensed that the narrative is propulsive and addictive. Benny Griessel, who has been a major and a minor character in previous Meyer stories, is now an official "mentor" to a group of young black and mixed race police detectives (the new wave of police in the new South Africa), and is tiptoeing around his mandate to guide them without taking over their cases. Griessel oversees two cases, each full of violence, politics, social observation, police procedure, and vivid characters. While one plot drives forward with motion rather than mystery, the other is more of a puzzle, and the cops involved in these separate tracks use quite different techniques and skills in the pursuit to which they are assigned, another testament to Meyer's command of the material and the genre.

China: The followup to Diane Wei Liang's The Eye of Jade from a couple of years ago is a more assured novel though it retains the mixture of family, politics, and melancholy from the first book. The tone of Paper Butterfly has something in common with another Chinese emigre crime writer, Qiu Xiaolong, and perhaps it is the approximation of Chinese culture and speech that is the source of the similarity. Tiananmen Sqauare lies behind Liang’s characters' stories and motivations (and also is important to Liang’s own history). The second Mei Wang will keep you turning the pages with interesting characters, plot, and politics.

France: Dominique Manotti sets each of her crime novels in a particular historical milieu of late-20th-century France. Her most recent novel to be translated into English, Affairs of State, is set in 1985 and deals with the political and social conditions of the late Mittérand administration. The main characters (among a large cast) are a North African female cop (doubly unwelcome by other officers) and a pro-American leftist who is a behind-the-scenes advisor to the president. The plot deals with the international arms trade (specifically involving Iran, under an embargo at the time because of the Iran-Iraq war), a high-end brothel, competition among police and intelligence services, murder (deliberate and accidental), and the impossibility of prosecuting certain people for crimes ranging from prostitution to murder (because of their political influence). It's a terse, short book with few sympathetic characters and with sudden changes of direction and no simple or pat conclusion. Manotti demonstrates how a crime novel can effectively incorporate social events and political realities without sacrificing the story, as well as how a noir story can deeply investigate social circumstances.

Australia: Adrian Hyland's Emily Tempest is a half-Aboriginal woman who grew up in the Outback, left it to travel the world, and is now back. The mythologies of her Aboriginal friends and relatives are particularly important: in Gunshot Road, maps are a particular focus, and not only those graphed on paper, along with a legendary figure who apparently buried under a collapsed mountain years before. Emily has been hired as a kind of auxiliary police officer, and only occasionally in touch with the people of her village (where much of the crucial action took place in Hyland’s first novel, Moonlight Downs). She's adrift, and uncertain about which of the townspeople, miners, suspect, police, victims—and even a Chinese artist—she can trust. The story is a rich adventure with occasional violent action. The series reveals a very different facet of the Australian experience from the others in the crop of the current, remarkable burst of creativity in Australian crime.

Brazil: Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s Alone in the Crowd, like all the author’s novels, follows the chief of a police precinct in Rio near the city’s famous beaches, and in this case, we get a bit more of Espinoa (whose childhood is related to the case at hand). Garcia-Roza’s novels offer portraits of personal flowing from the personality and life-history of the characters. Alone in the Crowd moves slowly, as the suspect ruminates on his love of walking in the middle of the city’s crowds and the detective puzzles over the crime, the suspect, and forgotten incidents of childhood. Espinosa pursues small-scale, personal crimes and meditates on their meaning, with the favela/slums of Brazil held at some distance, only briefly mentioned, unlike the more violent novels of Brazil by Leighton Gage; perhaps we need both in order to have some chance of understanding that culture, in its realities, potentials, and dangers.

Canada: Sandra Ruttan's Nolan, Hart, and Tain series has been unusual in several respects, including the balance among the three central characters, RCMP detective-constables assigned to Canada's Southwestern corner. But another important aspect of the series has been the substantial, unexplained backstory of the first case that the three worked on together, a case that has cast a shadow over them from the first novel, What Burns Within, uniting and dividing them at the same time. With the third volume, Lullaby for the Nameless, Ruttan uses multiple timelines to carry the story of Nolan, Hart, and Tain forward while also going back to the "myth of origin," the case that first brought them together, as well as the cases they've been on since then. The three characters orbit around various cases and one another, Nolan in isolation from the other two until the very end, when the cases intertwine and lead back to their original case. This is a police procedural of the first order, but with the story told through the characters and their conflictual histories more than through the serial murders and their echo in the current case. We do get glimpses of the murderers and their victims, almost as if caught momentarily in the headlights of a passing car, but for the most part Ruttan pulls off a jigsaw puzzle of information resulting from the investigation itself, in a fractured perspective of overlapping points of view, and what each reveals to and conceals from the reader. Lullaby for the Nameless is a vivid, noir portrait of the hard-scrabble small towns, ethnic tensions, dark urban corners, and deep forest environments of contemporary Canada, through the eyes of three fascinating, troubled investigators.

I’m currently reading a Polish police procedural that promises to deliver a compelling and sometimes comic insight into an Eastern Europe 20 years after the transformation of that region—and yet another vital international point of view on crime and culture. Check my site to see my review on this and other great books.

The Facts of Life

Today's guest blogger is Alli Sinclair, an Australian-born writer who has lived in Argentina, Peru, and Canada. She has climbed some of the world's tallest mountains, worked as a tour guide throughout South America, and tended bar in an Irish pub in Peru. Alli recently completed VESTIGE, a paranormal romance set in Peru, and is currently working on a mystery set in Argentina. Her inspiration comes from her travels, but the facts? Where else.

Writers love sending readers to other worlds, to give them an experience they wouldn’t normally get in the ho-hum of day-to-day. Perhaps the reader will learn something new about someone else’s life, or about them self. But what takes an average story and sends it skyrocketing into another realm?

One of the greatest compliments a writer can receive is when a reader says, “I believed I was there.” Perhaps the reader felt like they were standing next to Eva Peron when she made her speech from the balcony of the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires. The reader’s skin sizzled from the electric atmosphere of the adoring fans crowding into the Plaza de Mayo. The reader could study the intricate details of the Baroque architecture and then gaze at the glittering Cartier bracelet Eva Peron was wearing. Cartier bracelet? Who would have known? A savvy writer who spends time on research would have known, without a doubt.

When a reader picks up a book, not only are they investing precious time, they trust the writer knows about the subject. But how can a writer know that Incas cut off their hair when a loved one passed away? Research. How can a writer know spider webs were used to cure warts in the Middle Ages? Research.

With the age of the Internet, research is a lot easier than back in the dim dark days when people knew how to use the dewy decimal system. Don’t know what the DDS is? Do some research! Now that Google and the like are commonplace (google is officially a verb, believe it or not), research should be relatively easy. But take heed before you google. There is a lot of dodgy information out there that can lead an innocent researcher down a very crooked, slippery path. Working out which web sites are reliable can take almost as much time to research as, well… the research itself. That’s why it’s better to do some in-person investigating if given the chance. And luckily, I’ve had more than my fair share of opportunities to do just that.

I write books set in South America that include historical elements. The stories also have a paranormal side, which means I can create my own world. But I want my stories to feel genuine. If I know the Incas used ornamental pins that could double as a knife, then I will weave in that detail. It might not be significant, but it gives my writing a depth it otherwise wouldn’t have. Sure, I could have googled or (gasp) gone to a library to find this out, but I was able to draw on the knowledge I gathered when working as a tour guide in Peru.

Perhaps this first-hand experience is what fuels my passion for writing stories set in South America. Although, I believe this is a case of chicken and egg. Am I a writer or traveler first? For me, the two are inseparable. All that time spent travelling the globe, I was researching, even though I had no idea I was doing it at the time. Standing among the ruins, I learned historical facts that fuelled the storyteller in me. I could close my eyes and picture the fires burning in the centre of the plaza, smell the incense and hear people speaking a language that no longer exists. To me, research is in my makeup and without doing it, my brain would implode from boredom and my stories would fall flat.

What about you? Is research in your nature? What do you like to research and how do you do it?

On Psychic Comforts

If you’ve been following the Wicked Writers this week, you know some of us have a lot of weighty issues on our minds. Loss and uncertainty can do that to you. And weariness. I've been struggling with my own lately. Too much to do, too many people to please, not enough time or stillness to stop and breathe. So today, here are few of the little things I’ve been making time to enjoy.

Herbs. I have a fabulous Persian recipe that, while rather involved, requires chopping heaps of fresh herbs—parsley, cilantro, spring onions, garlic chives, fenugreek—to create the best aromatherapy ever. The combination of these ingredients serves a dual purpose: After making all right in the world with its uplifting, refreshing scent, it goes into a stew that’s the ultimate comfort food. Mmmm.

Cartoons. I spend the day writing and editing, and occasionally, after the girls are back from school, we watch a cartoon together. My eight-year-old prefers Word Girl, in which a young girl, secretly a superhero, solves crimes through her brilliant vocabulary, powering up with the expression “Word up!” My five-year-old prefers Martha Speaks, about a dog that eats alphabet soup, the letters of which go to her brain instead of her tummy. The result is a talking dog with, go figure, a strong vocabulary and the ability to solve crimes. Another result: my girls may breeze through those SATs in another decade and/or save the world from evil villains. And how cool is it that my kids love both mysteries and wordplay?

Kids. Me, walking in on the girls during what looks to be very serious play: “Whatcha doing?” Them (in front of toy laptops with no batteries): “Looking ourselves up on the Internet to read about  all the ways we make the world a better place.” Sigh.

Sweet discoveries. My first Louise Penny novel, Teavana’s Arcadian Apple Tea (“with a touch of ambrosial papaya”), unused gift cards for spa treatments.

Free time. I’m working on this one. Writers have to recharge and sometimes the best way is to not think about writing. Maybe tomorrow.

Rejection Is So Yesterday

As I prepare to start pitching to agents in the coming months, I anticipate plenty of rejections along the way. I know they’re coming, but I’m nonplussed. Right now, I’m more concerned about pulling together a 25-word capsule (the infamous elevator pitch), updating my query letter, and making sure there’s nary a typo in my manuscript.

Rejection is where all writers--all people, really--come together, after all. It comes in all shapes and forms, doesn’t it? The longer you live, the more of it you’ve experienced. If I were a more youthful writer, I’d probably be more emotional about it. (That is, I was more emotional about it at one time.) But these days, it’s like a ding on the car door. Annoying, but quickly forgotten.

Unless I can learn something from it. Remember my story about the boss who called me into her office to discuss the typos in my emails? Well, I have to say, I’m kind of OCD about typos now. In a good way, I hope. (You should see my to-do lists. Such penmanship!) We can learn a lot from a sincere rejection when we’re willing to stop, listen, and be humble.

Stories abound of famous authors, past and present, who received plenty of rejections before making it big. Or authors who were ridiculed in their own lifetimes then their books became required reading in later generations.

It helps that I know many accomplished authors, published and unpublished, who’ve amassed their own heaps of rejection letters. It doesn’t mean their books aren’t worthy. In fact, the inverse is often true. I’ve lost count of all the awful books I’ve read and wondered, “how did this one make it??”

Stephen King has a great story in his inspiring book, On Writing, about collecting his rejection letters in a box until it overflowed. If I recall correctly, he had to get another box. And look at him now—the most successful writer in the world.

So yeah, I’m nonplussed. Though you might want to check back with me in a couple months.

Genre Hopping and The God of Good Luck

When my first child was born, I came across an anthology called The Broken Tusk: Stories of the Hindu God Ganesha. It’s a collection of mythological stories about the iconic elephant-headed god, a poetic rendering that downplays the violence without losing the original essence of these stories. It’s beautifully done, and I read portions of it aloud to my two-year-old, iffy whether she was old enough to appreciate it. She was captivated, raised lots of interesting questions, and wanted to know more.

I was so thrilled by her reaction that I emailed the author, Uma Krishnaswami, to let her know how much we'd enjoyed her book and that someday, I too hoped to be able to write stories my daughter would enjoy. Why did I throw that last line in? I’m not sure, but Uma replied immediately, something along the lines of, “no time like today. I teach an intro class on writing for children at writers.com. You should sign up.” Whoa. I was thinking some day, not now. I hadn’t expected to start writing right away but why not? It seemed like kismet, and the class sounded both challenging and exciting. So I signed up.

Of course, it didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. Uma was a wise and generous instructor, and I learned a ton, but I’d sort of assumed reading lots of children’s books to a young child each day gave me some kind of institutional knowledge, like I had a leg up on everyone else taking the course. Not by a long shot, it turned out. I couldn’t quite master the voice to write for young kids. With each consecutive assignment, I began writing towards older kids. First picture books, then middle grade, then young adult. Nothing worked. My style just didn’t fit the genre.

By the time the class ended, story ideas began brewing any way. Already a voracious reader, I started reading a wider variety of fiction to figure out where my voice did fit. It took me another year to find it in mysteries and, now six years later, I've completed a full-length novel and a good chunk of another in the works.

But my journey really began when I read Uma’s beautiful collection of stories. It’s certainly fitting, considering that in Hindu custom, all great journeys begin by invoking Ganesha, the lord of beginnings, the patron of letters and learning, and the remover of obstacles. And maybe someday, I'll be ready to write those children's stories.

Education Unbound

Years ago, soon after I’d first moved from Texas to Washington, D.C., I was riding in a car with a good friend and her two-year-old son on the outskirts of the capital, in suburban Virginia. My friend was driving and I was navigating, which of course explains why we were, er, a bit lost. At one point, bewildered, I asked her, “is this Lee Highway?” Before she could answer, a tiny voice behind us asked, “Lee Highway? As in Robert E. Lee?”

I was floored, and turned to my friend, who explained, “we go to the library a lot.” That little tyke, back then a massive consumer of anything related to the civil war and the solar system, is now a brilliant, articulate college student, who rest assured, is not only a future leader, but already a successful leader at the age of nineteen. Sure, he’s smart, driven, and has great parents who want only the best for him, but he also had this amazing local resource that opened up new worlds and fed his enormous curiosity and enthusiasm to learn.

While it’s easy to underestimate the role of libraries in American life, this week forced me to dig deep and examine a pillar of our daily life. My own daily life, that is. I now live in suburban Virginia myself and check my library card online at least several times a week to put books and movies on hold for myself and my family, check my overdue status (not that bad, really), and see what’s new. At this particular moment, our family has 36 items out on loan. And yet, our library is so much more to us than a place to check out free stuff. I’ve even had to start limiting our visits there as time stands still once we walk inside.

Sure, they offer a lot more than books. We get the latest movies (we finally canceled our Netflix subscription after we found our library offers most of the same movies, albeit with huge waiting lists), free Internet, and even the educational computer games my kids love. (My four-year-old is particularly hooked on one where she has to map the route to hidden treasures. It’s helped her math and geography skills more than her expensive preschool has been able to accomplish toward the same goals.)

This past month, my seven-year-old walked in and asked the librarian for books about “Middle English.” I was skeptical. I’d remembered studying Old English back in college, but Middle English? Would our community librarians even know the term? As it turned out, we walked out with several stacks of books that took three of us to carry. A couple of them were marked up with post-it notes, highlighting notable chapters on history, linguistics, and famous literature. Oh, and needless to say, we didn’t spend one red cent. On our way out, I was reminded of an earlier  evening (and some thirty bucks) wasted at Chuck E. Cheese to keep the same kiddos sufficiently entertained.

A couple nights ago, I attended a community service meeting at my daughter’s school. I’d arrived early as did one other mom. We made small talk, admiring our fine school library, when she said, “you know, when my daughter came home on the first day of school raving about this library, I knew we were off to a good start.”

True enough. We get so much more from our libraries than just books, don’t we?

Keeping ‘Em Short

An interesting thing happened on the way to this post. I’ve read voraciously my whole life, but I’ve never been much of a fan of the short story form. I don’t know what I was picking up before I started writing fiction but I typically found short story plots underdeveloped, with endings either too abrupt or too open ended for my taste (maybe both).

Recently, I’ve been working on an attitude adjustment. Conventional wisdom suggests that for first-time novelists looking to attract agent or publisher attention, literary credentials such as publishing short stories in magazines and anthologies can help move our queries up in the slush pile.

I do have an idea for a short story that happens to takes place here in Virginia, and while I’m noodling on it, I’ve actively started reading short stories again to better learn the form. Not surprisingly, I’ve had better luck getting into mystery short stories.

Laura Lippman is a new favorite, and her range often surprises me. Her stories can get pretty dark, which catches me off guard for another reason: have you seen the wholesome mugshot of her, with that broad, sunny grin, on the backs of her books? Could she really be writing some of those scary stories?

I’ve also been reading a lot of fellow authors from the Mid-Atlantic area, in particular, a series of anthologies by the Sisters in Crime Chesapeake Chapter, which I recently joined. I’ve greatly enjoyed what I’ve read from their first three collections. Their fourth anthology is out and the big launch party is this weekend (I hope to attend). And guess what? They’re calling for contributions to the fifth one. Only one requirement: the story has to be set in the Mid-Atlantic. Hm, maybe I should stop noodling and start writing?

Maybe you should too? Check out our own upcoming contest:

The Wicked team will be holding a unique contest this month. We’re asking our readers to try their own hand at writing short stories. Entrants submit a non-erotica short story under 3,000 words to wickedwriterz@yahoo.com by April 20th, 2010. First prize is to have your entry critiqued by three members on the team, the story will be posted here on the site, and you’ll be invited to guest blog with us in May! Second prize is a critique by two team members and to also have the story posted here on the site. Third prize will be one critique and an honorable mention.

Research as Muse

I’m one of those writers who can’t read a newspaper without wondering about the back story. There’s too much interesting stuff happening in the world, just waiting for me to riff on. That's why research is one of my best cures for writer's block.

Take for example, my recent research about the textile industry in Mumbai. Okay, before I lose you here, I'm writing a novel, not a history book, nor is the novel about textiles. However, my main character (MC) embarks on a new career that involves textiles. It has little bearing on how the story unfolds but it does inform some of my backdrop.

I hadn't given it much thought until recently, when I realized I needed to plump up a subplot. My writing buddy suggested I add a scene, possibly at a textile museum. The idea sparked my imagination. Does Mumbai even have a textile museum? The city’s economy relied on its cotton mills  for more than a century, until about the 1980s when a major strike more or less led to its demise. But in my travels to the city, I’d never heard about a museum dedicated entirely to its greatest source of income, art, and fashion. I did an Internet search, of course, and emailed an uncle who's a textile executive there. Then the juices started flowing. Not the writing juices so much as the idea juices.

It turns out the history of textiles in the city is pretty fascinating. During WWII, British India provided the Allied effort with the raw material that would become tents, uniforms, bandages, and stretchers. I also learned the head of the textile company my family worked for had been assassinated a decade ago by a mobster. In addition, the section of town the textile companies abandoned is being revitalized into a massive commercial district, with fancy malls and discos. Yet despite a long, glorious history, there's still no textile museum in Mumbai.

Hm, what if…?

A similar spark occurred when I started working on the book’s sequel, set in Cairo. Some time after plotting, reading guide books, developing characters, sketching some initial scenes, and talking to people who'd visited the city, I lost steam. I had learned plenty about popular drinks and national foods and neighborhoods and where to plop down a hotel or an embassy. But the story was starting to feel one­-dimensional.

Then last fall, during the height of the H1N1 scare, I found out the government of Egypt had rounded up all the pigs in the country and slaughtered them—despite published evidence that pigs were not responsible for the “swine flu” epidemic. Better safe than sorry, they'd decided. As a bizarre result, Cairo became overrun with, of all things, trash. Yet another great example of how the truth is often more fantastic than anything I could make up.

It turns out that by killing the pigs in Egypt, the government put most of the country’s Christian minority out of work. Coptic Christians live in an area called Zabbaleen, which if you can believe it, refers to both people of that faith and to the garbage. (The slum/suburb where they live even translates to Garbage City in English.)

The double meaning of "zabbaleen" is not meant to be a slam on Christians, but a strange fact in itself. Members of the small, poor community in this largely Muslim city had forged livelihoods as pig farmers, catering to western hotels and restaurants. As a result, they also became garbage collectors, separating discarded food items from the trash they collected so as to feed their pigs.



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They then found resourceful ways to offload the nonfood items, recycling or reselling it. For example, they sold scrap metal to China, plastic bottles back to their own government for a few pennies apiece, even animals bones to factories to make glue. (How's that for an image?) In this way, one report estimates that Cairo had one of the highest recycling rates, around 85%, in the world. That was the case until last year, when the government killed the pigs and deprived the farmers of their main source of income, in turn giving them little incentive to collect the trash. The city's still feeling the repercussions, with piles of trash littering streets all over town.

Few of these details actually make it into my book, especially since my story takes place well before swine flu hit. But what I learned about Cairo from this bit of research gave me much of the context I needed to understand my setting, much more so than the guide books could offer. This new information gave me the spark for entire scenes, settings, and character development I wouldn’t otherwise have had. Little of these have to do with garbage itself (thankfully). But talk about inspiration--I guess one man’s garbage really is another’s gold. (Now if I only could finagle a trip to Cairo. Ahem, for research, of course!)

Anyone else out there for whom research spurs a story?

Getting It Right

Earlier, whenever I read a really good book, one I couldn’t easily put down, I inevitably thought, “Wow, that story must have just flowed right on to the page.” I figured it was so clear in the author’s mind, it had to fall on the page with equal ease.

That may be for some authors, but not this one. When I first started writing book one, I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted it to go. In fact, I’ve kept many of the same characters, plot lines, and themes as my original concept. But all of these elements have evolved over the four years I’ve been working on them. They're taking somewhat different shapes and subtleties, and plot lines unfold a little differently, but the essence is all the same.

I didn’t know if I’d been moving closer to my original vision or farther, but I kept going until I hit a wall last summer. I finally heeded the advice of writer friends who suggested it might be time to start a new project.

So I moved on to book two. I brainstormed and outlined until National Novel Writing Month, last November, when I actually sat down to write. And surprisingly, that partial draft is not half bad. I certainly think I’ll keep more of it than I did from my original first draft of book one. Soon, I was raring to go again, getting excited about mapping out books three and four.

The biggest challenge I've faced with going from the first story to the next in the series is in timing. I’ve learned so much and have evolved greatly as a writer since I began the first novel.  Keeping myself focused on improving my craft, trying a new outline technique, and mastering dialogue made writing the start of the second book easier, but it also left me with the burning desire to polish the first book until it, too, was up to par.

With my enthusiasm level way up, I went back to finish what I started with book one. So I’ve gone back in, pulling it apart, word by word, chapter by chapter, deleting scenes, adding new ones. I wish I could move on to the second book already, but I can’t until I rewrite and revise the original to the best of my new abilities.

It’s painfully slow, picking at every tiny element, but in the end it will be worth it. I’ll have not one but two books I can be proud of (and hopefully sell). I don’t plan on being one of those writers I often hear stories about: “He wrote fifteen books before the first one sold.” While I currently have a love-hate relationship with book one, I do believe the process is making the novel as good as it can be and me a better writer.

A View From Norway

[caption id="attachment_1536" align="alignright" width="106" caption="Karin Fossum"][/caption]

Lately, I’ve been hooked on Scandinavian crime novels, most recently those by Karen Fossum, known in her native Norway as the Queen of Crime. Judging from the two books I’ve read so far, she deserves the royal title.

The Water’s Edge, the sixth novel in the Inspector Sejer series, was my first introduction to Fossum. The setup  and initial point of view were intriguing: a married couple hike through a forest on the outskirts of Oslo. It’s an ordinary scene, a pair of retirees taking a stroll together. However, privy to the wife’s internal thoughts, we learn she’s unhappy, afraid of her domineering husband, and worried about why he’s been so quiet. Is one of them about to become a murder victim?

No, instead, after crossing paths with another hiker, they discover a dead body, that of a small boy. That’s when I started having doubts. Do I want to know where this is going? I love suspense but I have a low tolerance for gratuitous violence and senseless killings, especially anything involving children.

A little skeptical, I kept reading. The couple realizes that may have been the murderer they passed earlier. They report the crime and now we’re in Inspector Sejer’s point of view. Our flawed hero is lonely, long since divorced, and living alone. The adult daughter he did not help raise drops in for unannounced, random visits, testing his patience but obviously trying to win his love and attention. Despite his lack of adequate forward motion in this area or in his equally stagnant love life, you feel Sejer’s need to find the truth when he’s working a case.

For that reason alone, we accompany him on his journey for the truth and even root for him despite his personal failings. When we have to face a difficult, violent truth about the murdered child, it’s a tad more bearable with him as our guide.

Fossum’s fourth Inspector Sejer novel, The Indian Bride, takes on the premise of the first Indian immigrant to a small Norwegian community. Of course, I had to read it! Again, she begins her tale from the point of view of characters whose lives are about to change drastically. Simple Gunder Jomann, who sells farm equipment in his rural town, takes his first trip outside Norway to find a bride in India, and his younger sister is pretty concerned. I won’t tell you more—finding out where this all leads is highly compelling, one of the strongest portions of the book.

Both books are relatively small, quiet, and satisfying. Fossum kept me turning the page but not so fast that I couldn't get to know the characters and enjoy the growing psychological suspense along with the whodunit factor. The character development for both books is strong, subtle and packs an emotional punch.

As Publisher’s Weekly commented in its starred review of The Indian Bride:

“Fossum may not be well-known outside a select circle, but that could change with the publication of this outstanding contemporary police procedural…. The ending is not one most readers will expect, but it perfectly suits the tale of sad, little lives and the tragic consequences of chance.”

Well put, and for me, this describes both the Fossum books I read.

I look forward to reading the other installments of this fine series. Have any of you read any other books by this author or others from the region?

Learning As I Go

As with my fellow Wicked Writers, I’ve enjoyed thinking back on all the great advice I’ve received over the years and am inspired and recharged by my trip down memory lane.

The first best piece of advice I received came from an old boss. I was new at my first reporting job for a national magazine in Washington, D.C., and dying to prove myself. Soon after starting the job, I'd ended a particularly challenging week of juggling multiple tasks and deadlines and wanted my boss to know all about it, in plenty of rich detail that she could perhaps save for a future personnel evaluation. So I composed a long interoffice email summarizing my accomplishments. Within minutes of sending it, she was in my office, a concerned look across her face.

She took a seat across me and seemed to search for the right words, which ultimately were: “Supriya, your email had not one, but several typos in it.”

Huh?

I countered with, “But I checked all the work that’s going into the magazine, the actual work, and there are no typos there.”

“That’s great,” she explained, “but you’re a writer so everything you write in a professional setting, even casual correspondence, affects our perceptions about you as a writer.”

I probably wasn’t grateful for this advice at the time but over the years, I’ve learned she’s right. Writers should always triple check the work we send out, not only to agents and editors, but to fellow writers and potential readers as well. All of them are likely to make assumptions about the caliber of our writing, our level of professionalism, and how serious we are about our craft based on careless typos or poor grammar. Some would say this isn’t fair, but it does happen and is easy enough to correct.

The second best advice didn’t come in the form of actual advice as much as a sharing of an experience. A few years into writing, I had reworked Breathing in Bombay several times already, and although I knew revisions would be necessary, I felt a long way off from getting it right. A writing friend of mine told me she’d spent years working on her first novel yet had thrown away close to a thousand pages of previous rewrites. I’d read her book and it was terrific, making me realize that while the work isn’t always easy, the journey and the potential results are well worth it. The friend went on to rewrite that terrific book at least once that I know of, write several others after it, and now has a contract from a major publisher that would fill any novelist with envy.

And finally, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far on my own writing journey without CJ Ellisson, who is far more than my writing partner but also an incredible role model. She’s turned a lot of conceptions I had about writing, both the process and the journey, on its head. Though she’s a fairly new writer, what she lacks in years of experience, she makes up for with sheer raw talent, high energy, dedication to learning the craft, and her generous support of other new authors. I learned various aspects of craft from her, such as an efficient technique for outlining, ending a chapter at the start of a new scene rather than at the end of one, and so on.

More important, she showed me how writing fiction today involves more than just spending year after year mastering the craft but also a disciplined approach with an end goal in sight. I could have been writing for another 10 years before I felt comfortable enough even telling non-writers I’m working on a novel. Following CJ’s lead, the journey became practical−and fun.

Beyond all the useful writing advice, what CJ has taught me most of all is something all novelists require–an unwavering belief in one’s self and one’s work.

CJ jokes to everyone about being an “aspiring New York Times bestselling author.” The fact is that only a year after beginning her journey, she’s written a phenomenal novel AND acquired representation from a successful literary agent who recognizes what CJ has accomplished in such a short time and how vast her potential is. It’s no surprise that her new agent represents a number of NYT bestselling authors. If you can dream it, it will happen. Watching CJ succeed by believing in her abilities has given me the confidence to believe in myself and make my dream reachable too.

Switching to My Editor Hat

Between last night and this afternoon alone, I spent close to six hours composing barely two pages of my own work that I’d been trying to get a handle on for the preceding several days. That may sound maddening (sometimes it is) but I also consider this particular experience successful.

In general, I spend way more time editing work already written, my own included, than writing new work. In the past six months I have edited one full-length work of fiction, at last count three times, and still need to do another round before it goes to press. I also edit technical documents and government proposals, which I do love as well as rely on for income.

For me, all of this has been part of my path to publication. One thing I’ve found is that it can be extremely difficult to edit one’s own work. There are some terrific books out there that help with the self-editing process. Two of my favorites are Don’t Sabotage Your Submission and Manuscript Makeover. Why do I keep buying books about something I do professionally? Because there are three types of editors (at least) needed to make a novel shine.

The first is a copy editor. Now laugh if you will, but it will be difficult to get a publisher to consider your work if your manuscript has even minor punctuation or grammar issues. A trained professional at a major publishing house or literary agency probably won’t take the time to read the incredible content you’ve created if you’ve formatted it incorrectly, use lots of  commas where you shouldn’t, or forget where to place a period. These editors will put down your work if they think it would require too much effort on their part. Why not, when they probably have dozens of other good manuscripts sitting on their desks with as good or better content as yours that require less editing? I know this from experience. When I was hiring editors, I routinely rejected resumes if they had even a single typo.

Another type of editor is one who works on the craft of writing. This editor can tell you what is cliché, where your plot lines have holes, when your characters behave out of character, and when your dialogue sounds fake or stilted. Writing a novel-length work is essentially juggling a lot of details, so a huge task that falls to both types of editors is catching factual and timeline errors, inconsistencies from chapter to chapter, instances of “telling” more than “showing,” switching points of view in the middle of a scene, or when believability collides with credibility.

Lastly, when you get that golden ticket and a New York publisher is examining your masterpiece, you will have someone who edits your work mainly for content. (And when they are done, and after you make corrections, the entire piece will again go to a copy editor to be perfected). Now, by the time this content editor talks to you, you’ve spent so long working on the piece that you can’t clearly see the forest for the trees. So you'll rely on these editors to make your work sing off the pages. They can revise a sentence to cut out words, make it more concise, and the story will fairly leap into life for the reader. Sometimes they rearrange paragraphs or suggest you cut scenes that lag—or beef them up. But, the work needs to be in near-perfect shape for it to get to this point.

How is a writer to cope? Most of us are not trained to wear all these hats, certainly not in addition to the creative one that we wore to write the book to begin with! My advice is to find a really good writing partner. I was involved with critique groups for years, and benefited tremendously from the ones that worked. What’s worked even better for me has been finding someone who could complement my own editorial skills and swap blocks of time going over each other’s work in minute detail.

Now, I can look back on five years of writing and realize how difficult it is to be the writer who wears all four hats. If you can do it, that’s great. It took me years to figure out that I couldn’t, despite being a professional editor.

Every step I take, every change I make, brings me one step closer in the publishing process. It is a long and winding road, but I’m glad I’m on it and I’m glad that you all are here watching us as the Wicked team heads down it. It doesn’t seem as dark and scary anymore, just long.

On an unrelated note, I wanted to share this great post from one of my new favorite authors who recently took on the genre vs. literary debate, a topic close to the surface for our Wicked group:

http://rebeccacantrell.com/2010/01/26/genre-vs-literary/

Enjoy!

“This Story Needs More Dialogue,” She Gasped

Writing believable dialogue in fiction has been a topic very much on my mind lately, and not only because it’s the Wicked Writers’ topic of the week.

In the past few years, I always thought writing dialogue was the easiest part of putting a novel together. Character A meets Character B at Location X and tells him/her Important Information Z. Simple. I invested much more time crafting plot lines, researching the accuracy of my settings, and so on. But now as I revise, I’ve discovered the trickiest element to get right is the one I gave least thought to.

One reason I may have downplayed the importance of dialogue is that many novels I love use it either sparingly or in between long passages of narrative (that is, non-dialogue). Middlesex, Water for Elephants, Life of Pi, and Poisonwood Bible are all contemportary novels that stuck with me long after I finished the last page.

I just finished reading a suspense novel recommended by one of our Wicked Writers followers, Suzanne Adair (thanks!): A Trace of Smoke. It’s an excellent example of a book that strikes the right balance between strong dialogue and a cinematic narrative style, evoking crisp images of Berlin in the turbulent year of 1931. (If you’re interested in other recommendations, please check out more of my favorite books on www.goodreads.com.)

However minimal dialogue appears within a piece, I’m discovering that it’s the engine that moves along any narrative. In recently editing and critiquing other writers’ works of fiction, I find that nowadays I’m often tempted to put down any book that relies mostly on large blocks of narrative to tell a story (or backstory). I need to understand the characters and hear their voices, not just learn details about their past. And as Greg pointed out in his post yesterday, these voices need to impart more than simply their words but give me a sense of who they are and what they're all about.

I’ve found that editing for a living, and now with a new eye on dialogue, has helped me to see the spots in my own writing that need tweaking. It comes almost second nature to me, when I see other writers insert three or four blocks of consecutive descriptive passages, to suggest, “break this passage up with some dialogue.”

Trying to apply that advice to my own work has been quite an eye-opener, to say the least. I can now understand the oft-heard lament of, “I had to skip those parts and jump right to the action.” Isn’t that what dialogue is in most stories—the action and interchange we all seek?

Wading Into The Deep End

Social networking is one of those fads that has taken over our culture at lightning speed. And as it should: what a great way to keep in touch with everyone you know at the click of a button or two. Yet the faster technology moves, the harder it is for me to keep up.

My most social network to date is the online chapter of the Guppies, which stands for the “great unpublished” and is a branch of the mystery writers’ organization, Sisters in Crime. Despite the name, many of its members are published and a good portion well on their way. As a member, I subscribe to a yahoo group and receive a digest of emails on any number of topics that come to my email account a few times a day. While I’m not as active a participant as I probably should be, I learn something new from reading through the other emails just about every day. I’ve also met and become virtual writing pals with other mystery writers, who help me offline with line edits, manuscript swaps, brainstorming sessions, and pep talks.

As for other networks, I’m pretty limited. I’m not linked in, I don’t tweet, and I only opened my personal Facebook account a little over a year ago to find out what all the hype was about. In the first weeks, you couldn’t pry me off it. (My kids told our friends that I worked for Facebook, which they really believed.) In less than two months though, I was just about over it.

It was wonderful reconnecting with people and seeing how great old friends were doing after all these years, but beyond that, I didn’t really need to know what they had for breakfast or how their morning commute was on a day-to-day basis. And I had little news of my own to share with  the world. Prior to December, I was happy to have a chance to peruse the news feed once or twice a month.

Unless of course, I have news of my own. Like I have lately, and then the social network and all its various attributes takes on an entirely new significance.

When it came time to publicize Wicked Writers, I was glad to have all these connections. The day I updated my Facebook status and notified my Guppy friends about my first blog post, our site had over 200 hits. And since we launched just over six weeks ago, we’ve had more than 3,500 hits. That’s quite a bit of traffic for five writers trying to generate some buzz. We’re thrilled, of course, with our success and hope to keep the energy going. I’ve also had some folks—both long-lost friends, other writers, and some potential fans—who’ve reached out to me personally, making the excitement about my book and my writing life feel more like a reality than it had earlier as well as making me work harder than ever.

I may be a long way from publishing my book, it’s hard to tell with that decision not entirely within my control, but as I wait, my perspective on social networking keeps evolving. I’m learning more about all the exciting resources for booklovers, such as goodreads.com, for example. But I have a long way to go.

Any blogs, online book review sites, or other places on the web you can share with us? I would love to hear your recommendations.

Nailing Mercury

Explaining to anyone what stage I’m at in my novel this year is a difficult proposition, since I’ve been trying to do several things all at once. I’ve partially written book two in my Across Black Waters series but stopped to go back and finish revising and polishing book one and figure out how to market it before getting back to book two. I hope to put the finishing touches on Breathing in Bombay by mid-March, take a few more weeks to aggressively polish it up, then start the query process and launch a web site.

If that weren’t enough, I entered three contests for unpublished authors in January, and was surprised when one of them asked me to be a judge for another category in the same contest. I agreed, in the expectation that I will be “between books” at that time (late March to early April). I hope I’ll be between books, that is, or else I’ll be juggling more than usual those weeks.

The March deadline looms heavy at the moment, since it’s taken me the better part of the month to prep just the first four chapters for the contests. I made between five to ten passes on each of those chapters individually before considering them complete and error free. And of course, as soon as I entered the contests, I immediately found all kinds of things I could have improved before submitting. Nature of the business, I suppose.

I’ve  been working on the same first novel for a few years now but this is about the fourth rewrite (or so) and I’m hoping the last. Some chapters have seen up to ten rewrites so it’s difficult to quantify the progress. The overall manuscript is in better shape than I’d thought, at least that’s what I’ve been told, but needs finalizing.

Revision is slow and can be painful for me but I need the fairly grueling schedule. It’s exciting to have a challenging deadline and try to push forward to meet it. Researching agents, working on the query letter, and figuring out web site design also help keep up my momentum and energy level. And editing the work of other writers also keeps editing of my own work more focused. The combination of all these tasks remind me every second of my end goal, something that eluded me till this year.

With lots of luck and hard work, I hope to get back to book two before summer, with plans to flesh out plans for books three and four in more detail before the end of the year. If I’m able to meet these other self-imposed deadlines, who knows? I may be writing book three at NaNoWriMo this fall. Tune in here to find out.

And The Joke’s On…

What do you get when you have five bloggers write on the topic of submitting their first agent query letters?

If you’ve been following the preceding posts, you’ll know that’s the topic of this week’s Wicked Writer posts, but I’ll tell you the punchline in just a moment. First, I’d like to share my newbie experience as a blogger with you and what led me to this point in time. (Stick with me. It’s part of the punchline.)

I’d been “working exclusively on my craft,” as I’d been telling everyone all these years, trying to become the best writer I could before I could ever even think of delving into the world of agent searches, querying, launching a web site, or anything remotely promotional.

Then nearly six weeks ago, some time before Christmas break, C.J., whom I’d known was in the process of forming a group blog and had so far enlisted three other writers to blog with her, called to tell me it’s two weeks before launch and she had one writer drop out. I was ready to give her my “can’t help you, I don’t know anyone looking to blog” spiel when I caught her next words: “…and so I have a proposition for you.” She followed up with how much she admired that I’d been working so hard to perfect my craft but that it’s finally time to “sh** or get off the pot.” (She’s an elegant one with words, our C.J.)

I said I would think about it, even though I was secretly thinking a great big NO. Why would I put myself out there like that? I felt sure that I was nowhere near ready to show my work to an agent, my writing’s probably not up to par yet, I have a lot of loose ends to tie up in terms of revising and polishing my first novel, and basically, I’m not really a blogging kind of gal.

What a month can do.

As anyone who knows C.J. knows first hand, she can wear you down—but in a good way. (I think she calls it “selling.” Um, sure, honey.) But she believed in me and my work and she wouldn’t let it go. I agreed to her crazy idea after I found out my fellow Guppy, Steve Liskow, was the first guy to respond to C.J.’s open shout-out for a male mystery writer on our news group. I’d always thought him well spoken and professional on all his posts. Maybe this was a good idea after all. Other people certainly seemed to think so.

But I still had my doubts. I was scared out of my mind, and spent the rest of my holiday break trying to write that first, scary post. (Do you see a scary theme here?) Then C.J. scared me some more: “if I’m promoting you to everyone I know, I expect you to get out there and promote yourself as well.” So she “encouraged” me (I think there was a pistol involved) to make the leap in telling my friends and family about our new venture and my first post, which revealed what I considered my most private secret: I want to be a published novelist!

The rest is history. There’s a terrific poem about a writer who had a lot of words and how all those words were strangling him. (I would tell you the name of the poet but, hey, I could be twisting his words.) That sentiment perfectly described me as a writer until about a month ago. How could I possibly tell people I was writing a book when I couldn’t get the words right?

But here I am, my fourth post in, and I’m raring to go. The creative juices are flowing, my writing is more focused, I have a specific plan toward publication this year, and for once, I feel absolutely excited about getting there.

Which brings me back to the punchline: I’ve never sent out a query letter.

Not yet. But I will soon. And the truth is, if not for C.J. and her holiday proposition, the right time may never have arrived, and 2010 would not have been the year I send out my first query letter.

Any other writers nervous about taking that first big step?

Three Ways I Skin The Cat

When the idea for Breathing in Bombay first came to me a few years ago, I raced to put the words on the page while they were still fresh. Instead of using an outline, I had a collection of plot points, characters, and a setting. I wrote fast and furious for a couple of months until I completed that first draft.

Since then, I’ve written three, maybe four, novels. Not different ones, mind you. Just the same novel, over and over. I’d like to think I’ve learned a lot through all these rewrites and revisions, but the best I can say is I’ve honed a writing process that works for me.

Once I have a concept, I prepare to write it by first filling out a detailed stepsheet. I learned this device from James N. Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Mystery. In it, he introduces the idea of filling in chapter-by-chapter information in a multicolumn spreadsheet-type format. The stepsheet allows me to more easily track plot points, subplot threads, clues, story questions to be answered, and any holes in the narrative. It’s easy to build on and adapt to my own crazy needs.

Secondly, after meeting a persistent new author, C.J. Ellisson, who convinced me to become her writing buddy (and later, fellow Wicked blogger), I discovered other excellent techniques. One is having a brainstorming session with a writing partner who gets my story vision. I run ideas, maybe even pieces of writing, past her, including how I plan to get from point A to point B (or C), goals I plan to achieve along the way, and what drives my characters’ actions. C.J.'s job is to find holes in these elements, and mine is to strengthen the core ideas and make them bulletproof. This interchange has transformed the way I write. My characters are flesh and blood individuals and the story is alive for me before I ever start writing.

C.J. also showed me a nifty little technique I’ve adopted for outlining. (Turns out Dickens outlined the same way. Always great to have an English teacher as a fellow blogger, no?) Here’s how it works. Once I have a basic story concept, I map out each chapter using three (at most, four) sentences: one sentence to cover the opening hook, one or two more to provide a high-level view of the overall chapter, and a last line for the ending hook.

I still start with a detailed stepsheet in which I flesh out the whole story and make sure everything links up, but while writing, I stack the shorter outline on top of the stepsheet and place both next to my computer. The outline in particular ensures my writing is both creative and spontaneous as well as tight and focused. In knowing the beginning and ending of each chapter and parts of the middle, the rest is just me trying to spin a good yarn. Sounds way too simple but I’m pleased with the results.

I added the third piece of my process back in November. I’d signed up for my first National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo, to write my sequel. Of course, I pulled together my detailed stepsheet, had a long planning session with C.J., and mapped out my outline. I also read NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty’s companion book on succeeding in the month-long writing race. In it, he advises getting through the month by writing as much as possible with no self editing. Instead, as he suggested, I wrote notes to myself at whichever point I was at in my text with a plan to go back and make those changes during a later revision. If I wrote something that I knew had to go, I highlighted or italicized it instead of cutting it. That allowed me to keep my writing groove (and meet the contest’s final word count).

Many NaNo participants attest to eventually having to throw out much of what they write during NaNo but that the intense process of writing all month forces them to finetune their story ideas. By the end of the month, some say they have at least a few nuggets of gold they can hang on to during revision. For me, starting with the other pieces—the stepsheet, the outline, the brainstorming session with another writer—all made my first draft pretty strong (with little to no garbage).

So that’s how I write novels. There are a lot of ways to approach this process, and I know my approach may not work for others. But the combination of these techniques gets me from concept to a solid first draft more effectively than any other strategies I’ve tried.

How about you? Any tricks of the trade or secrets to writing success you can share?

Solving the Genre Mystery

Literary fiction’s not considered a genre, but that’s what I’ve read most of my life, particularly literary novels set in exotic locales. Starting with The Good Earth back in middle school, I’ve always been drawn to intricate, elegant stories filled with poetic descriptions, faraway locations, and rich doses of history, drama, and social themes that make me think.

A few years ago, I got hooked on mystery novels, which offer many of those same elements along with a faster pace, higher stakes, and challenging puzzles that often force me to keep turning the pages way past my bed time. Not just following clues to solving crimes and other unusual circumstances but also to figuring out people and what motivates us. All the same stuff I love about literary novels, just presented in a different way.

So as I wrote my first mystery, Breathing in Bombay, I had to figure out what subgenre it fell into within the category. That’s when I realized there are quite a few of them: traditional (also known as cozies), suspense, and thriller; historical and futuristic; police procedural versus amateur sleuth; and so on. The choices seemed endless.

Of course, while I was figuring out my subgenre, I stayed on the lookout for good mystery novels with an international flair. I came across many excellent authors who’ve transported me to fascinating places: Tana French to Ireland, Karin Fossum to Norway, Stieg Larsson to Sweden, and my latest addiction, Arnaldur Indridason, who opened the door to both Iceland and East Germany with his stellar book, The Draining Lake.

I also began reading a new breed of American authors that includes Sujata Massey, S.J. Rozan, and Lisa See, whose main characters straddle two cultures. That’s a concept my series is based on as well, and how I discovered the multicultural mystery subgenre. I was thrilled to find a niche that combines adventure, intrigue, international settings, cultural issues and social themes. A niche where my own book belongs.  It’s been loads of fun to write—and hopefully readers will enjoy it too.

What about you? Have you read any good international or multicultural mysteries lately? I’m always looking for recommendations!

Supriya's Story

2009 was a good year. I began polishing my first suspense novel, Breathing in Bombay, and wrote nearly half of its sequel, Chasing Cairo. This year, I plan to finish revisions and find an agent to represent the first book, hopefully sell it to a publisher, complete the sequel, and begin work on the third novel in the Across Black Waters series. Oh, and while I’m at it, figure out how to blog. Am I up to the challenge? We’ll find out, right?

I feel more confident than ever about meeting these goals because I’ve spent several years exclusively honing my craft. Okay, more than a few years. I started my writing journey decades before the concept for these two novels occurred to me. I’d dabbled in fiction writing as a child and on through my teens before settling on journalism as my college major. I figured I had a better shot at paying my rent that way, and I was right, albeit marginally. (Those early paychecks didn’t quite cover the rent, truth be told.)

As a print journalist, I tried my hand at just about everything. I started out as a newspaper reporter in a small Texas town, went on to write features for a magazine supplement of a Houston newspaper, served as a media coordinator for a Washington, D.C. think tank (“on the Hill”), wrote opinion pieces for a number of major newspapers, fact checked financial articles, wrote about business trends for a Georgetown newsletter, oversaw production for a group of trade magazines, and ultimately served as its executive editor. Along the way, I did some ghostwriting and edited a few books. Looking back, I can hardly believe the fantastic opportunities I’ve had in the publishing world over the years.

But the best is yet to come. I’d always wanted to write a book. Any book; it never really mattered what kind. For a long time, I thought it would have to be nonfiction, given all of the above. Then a few years ago, I was struck by an idea for a mystery novel. Forget that I’d only ever read a handful of mystery novels in my life. How hard could it be? After all, I read a lot of other kinds of books. And I’m a parent: What can’t I do?

So, confidence in hand, I went off to write me a book. I read all the mystery novels I could get my hands on (still working on that, by the way) plus loads of how-to books. I took writing classes, joined critique groups and associations, chatted endlessly with my husband and fellow writers about ideas for scenes and characters and plot. And I started writing. And writing and writing ... and revising. The more I learned, the more challenging the endeavor became. Yet that first novel kept screaming out: “Don’t give up on me!” And finally, after an excruciating number of revisions, the novel I’d envisioned started to take shape.

Breathing in Bombay is the story of Indian-American Diya Rao, who moves to Mumbai to pursue her dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Soon after her arrival, the favorite aunt she’d been staying with is murdered, and the killer is on the loose. Devastated but determined to not give up and move back to D.C., Diya uncovers a trail of family secrets, corporate intrigue, and social causes gone wrong. The story is set in the summer of 2005, amid the backdrop of an actual historic monsoon flood that engulfed the city. As the water recedes, Diya’s quest for purpose and adventure in a new city becomes a fight for her life.

This book has been exceptionally fun to write. I get to revisit fond memories of interesting and beautiful places I experienced during my childhood vacations in India. I look forward to sharing my trials and tribulations with you as I seek publication for my first novel and toil to finish the second.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope we’ll see you back again soon. Comments welcome. We don’t bite! Well, all except for C.J., but that’s another story.