Category Archives: First Draft Blog

Academy Awards Preview – Live Action Shorts

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Oscar, Academy AwardsGetting ready for Oscar, the Trenton Film Society continued its “shorts weekend” yesterday with the live action shorts (see 3-1-14 post for the documentary shorts). Again, there were five nominees—all  foreign.  Between films were excerpts of interviews with a number of directors, including Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) and Sean and Andrea Nix Fine who grabbed the documentary Oscar last year for Inocente and Shawn Christensen who won the live action prize with Curfew—both of them extraordinary.

In these interviews, a number of producer/directors talked about the constraints of the short film, which are parallel to the challenges of the short story. The author/creator must be economical, focused, and, if the creative process is working well, can say something more piercingly memorable than in a novel or full-length film. They also spoke about how early short films presage the themes and approaches of full-length features later in the creator’s career.

Possibly, the beauty of short films will become more recognized as people become accustomed to consuming media in shorter and shorter formats. (Thank you, YouTube!)

The live action nominees were:

  • Helium (Denmark) – a sweet film, in which a new hospital worker befriends a dying child and helps him prepare for death by envisioning the imaginary land of “Helium”
  • Avant Que de Tout Perdre (Just Before Losing Everything)(France) – A woman and her children flee her abusive husband—tremendous tension, nicely paced
  • Pitaako Mun Kaikki Hoitaa? (Do I have to Take Care of Everything?)(Finland)—Hilarious doings as a couple and their two young daughters get themselves ready for a wedding—the shortest, at 13 minutes
  • The Voorman Problem (U.K.)—starring Martin Freeman (Dr. John Watson in Sherlock) as a prison psychiatric consultant who confronts an inmate prisoner who believes he is a god, possibly God. Based on a bit of David Mitchell’s interesting novel No. 9 Dream (though I didn’t remember this bit)
  • Aquel No Era Yo (That Wasn’t Me)(Spain)—Spanish aid workers encounter xxx child soldiers, and it isn’t pretty.

Watch them online or through Netflix and know what Ellen DeGeneris is talking about tonight!

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Finding the Soul of the City

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“The soul of a city can be found by talking a walk”—the premise and inspiration for generations of street photographers. In the February 2014 Metropolis, Jeff Speck, city planner, architect, and sustainable growth advocate writes about his book, Walkable City, claiming such visually rich environments are “better for your soul.”

Every Picture Tells a Story

Walking is certainly a better way to get a closeup look at the life going on around you. He illustrates that point with scenes of timeless urbanism captured by some of the giants of the street photography genre—Gary Winograd, Lee Friedlander, Vivian Maier, and others. The daily activities that animate city streets produce layered insights about both places and people. In a vital urban scene, “the presence of difference”—in ethnicity, race, class, income level, occupation—suggest endless story possibilities.

These images may require a second, even a third look, but it is clear why such photographs are often used as writing prompts.  What’s going on between those two? What are they looking at? What are they thinking? Why did he wear that?

 

Walkable ≠ Happy

Canadian journalist Charles Montgomery’s book, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Though Urban Design, agrees that walkability may be a component of a healthy city, but alone it cannot make a city a happy one. A more complex set of elements contributes to people’s assessment of their own well-being. Photographers have captured these factors, too:

  1. elbow room (“People like their space”)—think about how kids tag every graffiti-friendly surface, it’s a way of claiming something distinctly, if momentarily, theirs; or consider the “reserved” parking place
  2. green space—and not just the occasional pocket park, but big swaths of it worthy of Frederick Law Olmsted, connected in continuous corridors, perhaps helping to explain the runaway popularity of the High Line, and
  3. economic justice. In other words, a city cannot be happy when a large segment of its population is much poorer than the rest.

Quality of life may be high in great, high-status cities, but that “does not translate into feelings of well-being . . . where social stratification creates a culture of status anxiety.”  Those tensions, too, are evident in photographs of many urban streetscapes.

walkability, streetscapes, urban life, High LineMore:

  • Jeff Speck’s TED talk on the walkable city.
  • The 10 U.S. cities having the most people who walk to work.
  • How cities are trying to become more walkable.
  • What’s the “Walk Score” for your address (U.S., Canada, and Australia)? Moving? Find walkable places to live.  My neighborhood’s Walk Score is 35, compared to New York City’s 88.
  • Many of Vivian Maier’s works can be seen on the Artsy website’s Vivian Maier page.

Let It Snow (Not)!

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snow, writing, writer, author, mystery, suspense, reader“Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled . . .” – Dylan Thomas

The Central and Northeast U.S. isn’t the only country hit by snowstorm after snowstorm this winter. Take a look at how Tokyo residents responded after a 10-inch blizzard—its biggest blizzard in decades. Snow sculptures from the land of “Hello Kitty.”

Photo gallery from the 24th Annual International Snow Sculpture  Championships – Breckenridge, Colorado. Tokyo amateurs, be in awe!

Have a cup of hot chocolate and let Frank sing to you. Let it Snow!

Hot chocolate not warming enough? Here’s a hot toddy recipe that calls for brandy, whiskey, or rum (whatever you have, basically) and tea. The recipe says you can skip the tea. Just so it’s hot!

Your Cryosphere Glossary from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.  Perfect for teachers, dads, and moms who get asked those tricky snow questions. Find out where it’s snowing right now with the NSIDC “near-real-time” data map.

Simon Beck’s Snow Art—made by stomping around in the snow, very precisely. Not just your everyday snow angel.

A collection of Snow Poems. I like this one by Frederick Seidel. Good to remember when you’re stuck in the snow. Six-sided, too.

Snow is what it does.

It falls and it stays and it goes.

It melts and it is here somewhere.

We all will get there.

 A recent op-ed about the incomparable snow leopard, and how the big cats are saving people. She has her eye on YOU.

snow leopard, writing, mystery, author, reader, suspense

2-9-14 Readers, Writers, Booklovers Unite!

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Reading, book, Budi SukmanaHugh Howey’s Rants

Everyone who buys, sells, reads, borrows, downloads, and LOVES books has a stake in moving the publishing industry into the 21st century. It won’t happen easily. Best-selling indie novelist Hugh Howey (Wool) launched a well-aimed missile of advice at the industry in his notorious 1/8 blog post, “Don’t Anyone Put Me in Charge,” in which he explains what he would do if he ran one of the big publishing houses. He followed it up with a new barrage on 1/12, “My Second Month on the Hypothetical Job.” Even if thoughts about publication are not your daily preoccupation, his ideas are lively and thought-provoking.

For Publishing: A Radical Makeover

They would radically change the culture and the economics of the book business, making it better for readers and writers in the process. Among his memorable suggestions: get out of New York to cut overhead and get some work done. From home, mostly. (He suggests Houston. Not in August.)  He wants them to invest in Print on Demand, which would keep authors’ backlists alive. And he’d devote greater attention to the midlist bulge of authors. As publishers whittle down their emphasis to manuscripts that are “sure-fire” best-sellers, reader choice withers. And these are not people you’d want standing at the rail next to you at Santa Anita or Churchill Downs.

These next three were picked up by Business Insider writer Dylan Love:

  • “Every format, as soon as the book is available.” The day a book is released, you could buy it in hardback or paper, or Kindle, Nook, or other e-reader formats. No more stringing people along with a hardcover release, and letting them lose interest while they wait for the Kindle edition.
  • “Hardbacks come with free ebooks.” This “would change my perception of e-books overnight,” Love says. At present, e-book Digital Rights Management systems restrict readers’ flexibility. Bundling a hardback with a digital file would increase it.
  • “No more advertising.” In Howey’s publishing house, the firm’s money would “go into editors [remember when books weren’t full of mistakes?] and into acquiring new authors,” not into bookstore promotions and pricy advertisements that he says “don’t sell books.”

How Publishers Shouldn’t React

Howey admirer Baldur Bjarnason has drafted a list of tips for publishing insiders to use in their inevitable responses to Howey’s assault. The last of these is to make the argument that traditional publishers are “somehow responsible for keeping the general quality of books high.” I’ll let you explore for yourself Bjarnason’s links that stick the needle in that bit of puffery. LOL.

(Thanks to Beth Wasson at Sisters in Crime’s SinC Links for pointing out Howey’s and Bjarnason’s great posts!)

Amanda Knox Redux

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Amanda KnoxUnbelievably (or rather, not), the Italian Supreme Court this week reinstated the murder conviction of American Amanda Knox and her Italian former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito for the 2007 murder of Knox’s British flatmate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy. Knox and Sollecito’s original conviction was overturned in late 2011. The new verdict comes in spite of an overwhelming lack of evidence of the pair’s guilt and in spite of the conviction of another man for the crime, for whom plenty of evidence was present. His bloody finger and handprints were found all over the apartment and his DNA “inside” Kercher’s body. He has said, variously, that Knox/Sollecito are innocent, that they are guilty, and that he is innocent. He has told fellow inmates that he did the crime.

U.S. journalist Nina Burleigh’s The Fatal Gift of Beauty provides an excellent rundown of the facts of the case, including some of the reasons behind the Italian media and public’s apparent eagerness that “Foxy Knoxy” be found guilty. The compelling insights of former FBI man, Steve Moore, in his “Mind the Gap” blog post provide some understanding of why the Kercher family has likewise maintained its vehement insistence on Knox/Sollecito’s guilt.

After the murder, Knox was subjected to repeated lengthy interrogations and, though treated as a suspect, no lawyer was provided her. Her Italian was not good, and the “translators” assigned to her was actually working with the police and were, Burleigh says, “inclined—at least after the arrest—to put a certain spin on her voluminous writings in English.”

The interrogations went on for hours and, according to Knox’s description, involved many of the intimidation techniques—techniques known to produce false confessions—described in a December 9 New Yorker article by Douglas Starr. “The interrogator’s refusal to listen to a suspect’s denials creates feelings of hopelessness,” Starr wrote, “which are compounded by [fake information] and lies about the evidence.” A session of all-night questioning produced Amanda’s description of a “vision” in which Meredith was murdered, but which she soon recanted, blaming her statement on exhaustion and confusion

Up until this most recent phase of the legal wrangling, the prosecution was handled by a poster-man for Italian jurisprudence gone off the rails, Giuliano Mignini, whose erratic logic was amply documented in Douglas Preston’s book, The Monster of Florence. Preston has said the case against Knox is “based on lies, superstition, and crazy conspiracy theories.”

This case has been interesting on so many counts. I read Preston’s book as I was starting to write Witness, a suspense novel set in Rome that involves a number of crimes, and a sense of the way Italian jurisprudence works was essential. Along the way, I also received help from several experts in Italian law in order to clarify the powerful role the pubblico ministero (Mignini) plays in an Italian courtroom.

The case is a tale with many confusing elements—Amanda’s changing story, which is one of the chief marks against her, the mistakes in securing evidence from the crime scene, the conflicting interpretations of the DNA evidence, the clash of cultures when privileged foreign students indulge their freedoms far from home, oblivious to their conservative environment.

The story has fascinating characters, irredeemable tragedy at many levels, and the ability to evoke partisanship for or against out of proportion to the definite facts of the case. Every court proceeding seems to muddy the water further. While Amanda believes the truth is out there and wants people to find it, I’m not sure it will ever come to light, although in a U.S.-based extradition hearing, it might.

Name Your Poison

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“Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners” – by Alexandre Cabanel

“The Poisoner’s Handbook”—a perfect TV show for mystery writers–initially seemed an odd choice for one of PBS’s fine American Experience documentaries a few weeks back. It was based on the book by Deborah Blum, who appears among the show’s interviewees. About the book, Kirkus said, “Caviar for true crime fans and science buffs alike.” And so was the documentary, which you can watch here and which begins:

In 1922, 101 New Yorkers hanged themselves, 444 died in car accidents, 20 were crushed in elevators. There were 237 fatal shootings, and 34 stabbings. And that year, 997 New Yorkers died of poisoning.

Not all those deaths were intentional, it turns out. Ninety years ago, life was full of poisoning hazards at work and at home. You may remember the below-stairs tour of cleaning products, rat poisons, polishes, and “remedies” in the great home in the movie Gosford Park, all of which looked mighty suspicious when the master was murdered.

A major cause of death was carbon monoxide, an odorless, tasteless gas that got into the air thanks to leaky stoves and the piping for gaslights. Even today, when houses are shut up tight for winter, we still hear about deaths from malfunctioning space heaters or, difficult to believe though it is, charcoal grills people roll in to heat up the house. (In 2011, five members of a Long Island family were hospitalized when the 43-year-old mom actually did this.)

Poisonings are so much rarer today, the PBS program explained, because in 1917 New York City hired Dr. Charles Norris to be the city’s (and the nation’s) first chief medical examiner. Norris, born into a wealthy family, was one of those larger-than-life characters who create their own weather. Norris, in turn, hired Alexander Gettler to head the City’s first toxicology laboratory. Gettler and his staff built the field of toxicology from scratch, and he and Norris created modern forensic science. CSI fans are grateful.

Gettler soon realized that he and his staff had to conduct definitive studies of the way different poisons killed, their symptoms in various concentrations, and how they could be detected. Murder by poison, which had been difficult to diagnose in many cases, especially if it wasn’t suspected, became less and less feasible.

In 2011, I read The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor, a finalist for the nonfiction National Book Award in 2009. During his lifetime (120-63 BCE), Mithradates Eupator fought some of the most famous Roman generals, mostly successfully. At the height of his career, he governed 22 nations around the Black Sea and could speak all of their languages. He was an infamous poisoner. He believed his mother murdered his father by poison, and, to protect himself, he learned as much as he could about them.

One protection he engaged in was to take small doses of certain poisons every day to build up his tolerance. (Anyone familiar with Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mystery Strong Poison is familiar with this strategy.) As a result, when Mithradates’ enemies at one point gave him a lethal dose of something, it had no effect, which didn’t hurt his reputation for invincibility. In the region where Mithradates ruled, there was a body of water made poisonous by a deadly plant. Many ducks lived there and fed on the plant, unharmed. Mithradates prepared a great banquet for his enemies, featuring—you guessed it—those self-same ducks, and, by morning, his guests were all dead. He also developed a “universal antidote” to poison, still of scholarly interest. When the Romans finally captured Mithradates, he tried to commit suicide by poison, but his protection worked too well, and he was ultimately stabbed to death.

Gardeners may have noticed the King’s name is familiar: Eupatorium is a genus of flowering plant with several hundred species, including (and in my garden) Joe-Pye Weed. One of its species is, of course, poisonous to humans.

Circling back to American Experience, the underlying message might be that, much as Americans complain about “government regulations,” in the 1920’s before the Food and Drug Administration took dangerous patent medicines off the drug store shelves, before there was a Consumer Product Safety Commission, and before the workplace safety rules that protect people like the poor young women who worked as radium dial-painters and died horribly of jaw and bone cancer, everyday life was full of deadly hazards, and mystery writers had one more handy tool in their store of potential mayhem-makers.

Want more? 12 Toxic Tales from National Geographic.

apothecary bottles, poison

Working Both Sides of the Brain

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 Saturday’s “business side of writing” workshop reiterated the familiar disheartening theme that today’s authors (especially new authors) cannot focus solely on their writing. They need to think like entrepreneurs. Extroverts make great entrepreneurs. Alas, most writers are introverts, people who love to sit alone at their computers and create worlds.

“I don’t want to do all that promotion stuff, and I don’t know how!” is the common reaction. It’s like telling a boy who loves baseball that to succeed he also needs to take up needlepoint.

One of the presenters, Bob Mayer, pointed out today’s writers must compete fiercely for discoverability. In recent years, the estimated number of books published (mostly self-published) in the United States is between 600,000 and 1,000,000 a year. It takes a lot of effort to have any book noticed. It’s one frozen drop in a Niagara of ice.

Only two hardcover fiction books have been on the current New York Times list of best-sellers for more than 16 weeks (alas, and my snobbery is showing, one is by Dan Brown, but the other is Gone Girl, a super read).  Eleven of the 15 have been on the list less than three months. Remember when books were on the best-seller list for a year or more? Those were the horse-and-buggy days of book marketing, as gone as the girl is.

Our second coach, the estimable Jen Talty, pointed out the flaw in writers’ tendency to hang out with other writers—people who don’t ask, “So when is your book coming out?” when they learn the first draft (of probably 15) is done. What she advised writers to do is to connect with readers. That takes work and as much creativity as goes into the novel itself. “My book is for everyone” isn’t a marketing strategy.

Talty and Mayer have their own publishing partners enterprise, Cool Gus Publishing, capitalizing on opportunities in both traditional and electronic publishing. A key difference between the two is that traditional publishers are most interested in initial sales. If a book doesn’t do well out of the gate, traditional publishers’ efforts to promote it go from minimal to nonexistent, and the book vanishes. By contrast, Amazon (Kindle) and other e-publishers are in it for the long haul. Maintaining the e-file is all but free, and if an author has a book success next year or the year after or the year after that, sales of the earlier book will likely head up, too. Writers sitting on a backlist of books that never sold well are finding new revenues.

The publishing mountain gets steeper, but writers persist. It’s in our bones. Perhaps that’s because, as Mayer said, and contrary to the common expression, “Storytelling is the oldest profession.”

Best Reads of 2013

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’Tis the season for “best of” lists, and reading other reviewers’ lists of “Best books of 2013” is setting up my reading list for 2014 very well! Truth is, there are so many good new authors and so many interesting non-fiction books, being totally current seems hopeless.

Of the 52 books I read (or listened to—sometimes, an even better experience!) in 2013, here are the nine I liked best, the ones I gave five stars. The four-star books were pretty darn good, too. The entire 2013 list is on this website under “Reading . . .” Below my top picks are presented in no particular order, with my two absolute favorites appearing at the end.

***** The Empty Room – Lauren B. Davis escorts us deep inside the head of Colleen Kerrigan, an alcoholic, on the “worst-day-of-her-life.” A trip full of insights and terror that helps us better understand people in our own lives and their demons.

***** Victoria’s Daughters – Jerrold M. Packard. Getting all this complicated royal genealogy straight—given that Victoria’s descendants populated most of the thrones of Europe—and the different fates of her five daughters was fascinating. It’s hard to believe that Victoria, still so influential a presence in our literary minds, is the Great Great Great Great Great Grandmother of William and Kate’s son George! Full review here.

***** Flight Behavior – Barbara Kingsolver. A misdirected swarm of Monarch butterflies starts this novel on its way, intermingling science and belief and the priority a cast of mismatched characters place on each.

***** Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn. A deathmatch between two manipulative people that causes the reader to continually switch assumptions and allegiances.

***** The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection – Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler. The late 19th century Parisian demi-monde and the rise of scientific criminal detection. Full review here.

***** Telegraph Avenue – Michael Chabon. His usual high-quality writing and vivid characters whose fortunes become as entangled as jungle vines. What is it about? Ultimately? Everything.

**** Swamplandia! – Karen Russell. Nominated for the 2012 Pulitzer. Wonderful writing, I gave it only 4 stars, but Russell deserves extra praise for fearlessly exploring metaphor up to (and sometimes beyond) its full potential.

***** The Dinner – Herman Koch (read by Clive Mantle). A “nice dinner out” turns into an emotional conflagration. The perfect exploration of family secrets and what it means to have an unreliable narrator.

***** Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – Ben Fountain (narrated by Oliver Wyman). A finalist for the 2012 National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. For a war novel, there’s almost no war in it. Fountain explores the limitless terrain of hypocrisy, as a small company of ordinary American soldiers is feted for its bravery at the Thanksgiving Day Dallas Cowboys game.