Simple Mystery

My computer organization is still ongoing (or slow-going, as the case may be (and in fact is)).  One of the files I’ve come across is this rather depressing list.

Things I Want More of in my Life

• Healthy food
• Home-cooked meals
• Work
• Reading
• Exercise
• Regular sleeping hours
• Keeping up with family and friends
• Cleanliness

Why so depressing?  Because I’m pretty sure I wrote this list around Christmastime 2005.  And the things I want more of in my life?  Still these.

I’m not saying no progress has been made.  In fact, I think each area has gotten a little better.  But “a little better” was not, you know, what I was going for.  I was sort of looking to solve things, not just edge them along.  And now that I’ve uncovered this document, I have a horrible vision of myself making such a list at age sixty, only to find out it’s composed of the exact same items.

Maybe this is normal.  Maybe the things you care about become the quests of your life.  On the other hand, maybe more could be done.

So.  What to do, what to do, what to do?  Make resolutions?  I like resolutions.  But resolutions, I feel, are good for tackling one thing, or two things, or at absolute most three things.  Never, no, never, eight things.  The last thing you want to do is start the year hip deep in resolutions.  It is a perfect recipe for failure.

Well, then, how to simplify?  I recently heard of the idea of choosing a word to meditate on for the year, rather than a set of resolutions.  I like this because it’s simple (if, unfortunately, not very concrete).  And so, for 2010 I have chosen the word Responsibility.

It was a near thing between Responsibility and Discipline.  Discipline might better encapsulate The List, but Responsibility seems bigger somehow.  Like Discipline is about doing the things you must, but Responsibility is about doing the things you can.  Or something Spider-Man would say.

Here we are in February, and I’d guess that my RQ (Responsibility Quotient) for the first month of the year is… hmmm… 50%.  (Remember, if you’re not ranking and scoring things, you’re not having fun.)  I’ll see if I can improve that in February.  Does anybody else do this Word-for-the-Year thing?  If so, what’s yours?

One of the big items in the news today is the stimulus:  failure or success?  No, this isn’t a political post.  It’s a post, believe it or not, about story.

Consider the cases of two average (and fictional) Americans; we’ll call them Patty and Paul.  Patty has been laid off from her job as a dental hygienist.  And although she’s been applying and interviewing all over the place, she hasn’t received one offer of a job that pays more than her unemployment benefits.  As a result, she’s just had to move into her mom’s basement.

Meanwhile, Paul was laid off from his construction job, but quickly found new work through a stimulus-funded road project.  Things were a little tight while he was out of a job, but now he is catching up with his bills and starting to breathe a little easier.  He even managed to buy his wife a pearl necklace for their tenth anniversary.

Ask Patty and Paul whether the stimulus worked, and you’ll get fairly predictable answers.  For Patty, it didn’t; for Paul, it did.

Notice I didn’t say Patty thinks it didn’t, or Paul thinks it did.  That’s because I believe our reality is formed by the stories we live, take part in, or hear.  Patty’s got a “moved in with Mom” story, and so she’s existing in a world in which the stimulus was a big, fat flop.  Think of one of the things you most believe in, something you Know to be True.  You have a story to prove this, don’t you?  I suspect you do.  Moreover, I suspect you’ve told it to more than a few people in your time.

Do you live in a world in which a green apocalypse is imminent?  In which processed foods are a deadly scourge?  In which race is a real and relevant part of every social interaction?

I don’t live in any of those worlds, but I know, and respect the heck out of, people who do.  We are all going about, living in our own parallel worlds—and though they may intersect, they’re never fully the same.

Every time we tell someone a story, we allow them a peek into our world.  We allow them an opportunity to change their own world, or to harden its precepts, or to, ever so slightly, allow its boundaries to blur.

If this is true, we writers have a special responsibility.  Yes, our stories are fictional, so people are less likely to build their worlds around them.  But at the same time, we can reach so many, and we can hold their attention for so long, that it behooves us to treat the world we’re projecting with respect.  To make sure it matches up with our values, not just whatever’s convenient for the plot.  To make sure it is our True World, set out there for everyone to see.

So, one of the things I’m doing while I wait for my book to find representation is organize my computer.  It needs organizing in the worst way.  I have all sorts of documents floating around in all sorts of folders, some of which date from the time when I still thought Courier was the only acceptable font.

That’s a long time.

It’s been interesting stuff to comb through.  In a big, unorganized, chaotic kind of a way, it’s a record of my progress as a writer.  You’ve got gems like this:

A family witnesses the death of their grandmother.  Their emotions about it are varied and complex.

From my literary days.  Can I just say, mega-bleh?

(I mean, I’m not claiming it’s an examplar of the literary genre, ok?  It’s a mega-bleh in its own right).

Then there’s Series Ideas.doc, which I put together when I was trying to decide which of several ideas to actually work on.  Eventually I decided 1920’s Chicago was where I wanted to go, and settled into my current book, The Big Life.  But there were lots of candidates in the running, including:

Gamer Mysteries

Skylar Vaughn runs a company that specializes in creating high-immersion gaming experiences for parties– solve-a-mystery weekends, etc.  When one of her clients winds up dead, Skylar must solve the murder in order to keep her company afloat.

Here’s the intro:

“Oh, my God!  She’s been shot!”

My best friend, Polly Polonsky, lay on the kitchen floor in a slowly widening puddle of blood.  I shouldn’t have been upset.  After all, I had known this would happen.  I had planned every step.  But I couldn’t help but be moved to uneasiness by her still pallor.  And reminded of how fragile life really is.

Polly’s a genius at shallow breathing.

This one is interesting to me because although it’s in the same light-hearted sub-genre as my current book, it feels so much… frothier.  Cuter.  It’s fun and all, but it just doesn’t feel like a serious idea to me anymore.  It doesn’t feel like a book that would have any Story apart from the actual plot.  It is, to be blunt, not up to my current standards.

And we’ve even got a few nonfiction ideas:

Be Prepared

Each chapter focuses on a different event a family might have to go through: the death of a loved one, the long absence of a spouse, a serious illness.  Each chapter is short and easily digestible, and full of simple, practical tips for dealing with the chosen situation.

Of all the ideas in my big mess of files, this is the one I most regret not having the interest to pursue.  I think it would be something people could really use, because, you know, shit happens.  And shit tends to be complicated and expensive.  And when shit happens, people rarely have the time—or the emotional fortitude—required for a long Google search to figure out how to handle it.

What they might have time for is reading a brief 10-20 pages that tell you how to get a casket without paying an insane markup, or how to acquire your partners’ power of attorney so that you can make decisions in his absence, or how to apply for charitable aid.

But realistically, I am not going to pursue that book.  As much as I like the idea of it, it’s just not a project I’d enjoy.

So there you have it: one idea I hate, one idea I like, one idea I kind of love.  None of which I am ever going to pursue.  I’m not vain enough to think that anyone reading this blog actually wants one of these ideas; I presume that other writers have their own truckloads of discarded ideas to plumb.  But if anyone wants one, have at.

As for me, I am wondering how many of these old files to keep, how many to consolidate, and how many to just pitch.  It’s always hard letting go of stuff completely.  But for the sake of grok-ability, that may be what I need to do.

Yesterday, Mark and I watched 9.  You know, that kid’s movie with the kickass trailer that looked like it was going to be so, so amazing?

Many parts of it were.  It was a fabulously original film with great graphics, cool action sequences, and a really wonderful hook.  The plot built, engaged, twisted, and then at the end it just kind of rolled over and died.

I was with 9 right up until that ending, because it was clearly a movie that was loved by its creators.  All the little ragdolls, with their unique looks and characters, spoke of love in a big way.  So did the unique use of music. And all of the wonderful detail.

When a project is loved, that usually means it’s going to be awesome.  Up was clearly loved.  So were Alien and Apollo 13. In the game world, we’ve got offerings like Lego Star Wars, Plants vs. Zombies, Guitar Hero.   And so many other movies, books, games, and TV shows that I can’t possibly list them all.

Loving your project means being willing to abide with it long enough to find all the little details that bring out its heart.  This is not an easy thing.  It is fundamentally sort of terrifying to spend time in a world of your creation.  Because if something is askew, amiss, feeble, or overwrought, it is all your fault.

Loving your project, then, requires faith not just in your work, but in yourself.

9 was loved.  I’m sure of it.  But 9 also fell flat at the end.  Why, I don’t know.  But here’s a guess: perhaps 9 illustrates one of the pitfalls of loving your project: loving it too much.  Loving it so much that you are no longer able to view it critically, so much that you become wed to your initial ideas and fail to seek improvements.

Whenever I decide to sell my house, I guess I get to sell it as a 2.75 bath instead of a 2.5.  That’s because about a month and a half ago Atlanta brought me an early Christmas present in the form of a porta-potty for my lawn.  And at this point, I guess it’s here to stay.

You have no idea how happy I was to see the thing arrive. A couple of months back Atlanta had some flooding. Some fairly serious flooding. And one of the casualties of that flooding was a big water pipe at my curb.

Emergency services hustled out and dug up the pipe, leaving behind what Mark and I have come to call, affectionately enough, the Hole. The Hole was vast and impressive, and seemed destined to be a permanent feature of our landscape.

It’s not that the city government wasn’t concerned. A few days after the flooding, a pair of orange cones appeared flanking the Hole. About another week later, the Hole was strewn all about with plastic orange fencing. A month after that, a missive arrived requesting our permission for city workers to enter our property in order to fix the Hole.

We signed the form and sent it back with enthusiasm. About a month after that, the workers arrived, porta-potty in tow, and began the various and sundry tasks associated with filling in the Hole.

So far their usual M.O. is to work about six hours, then leave for a week.  Although their last visit was on December 23rd, so we’ve just hit the three mark week.  The rest of the time they leave the digger there for the neighborhood boys to admire, which is a lovely public service.

Now, I don’t mean to sound too sour about it.  I am happy that the Hole is getting fixed.  And I have faith that eventually the digger and porta-potty will return from whence they came.  It just kind of boggles my mind that they can leave what must be a fifty thousand dollar vehicle sitting around on my lawn for three weeks.  I mean, don’t they need it for anything?

Last night, my writing group hit a bit of an awkward moment.  Outlander was talking about having read a Michael Connely novel, and I commented that Michael Connelly is the mystery writer’s mystery writer.  He is the person people describe as their major influence, their hero, their dream blurb.  And I said that I thought the reason for this was Connelly’s prose.

“Really?” said Outlander.  “I didn’t know genre writers cared about prose.”

“Of course we do,” I said.

So, yes, hr hmm, awkward.  But we breezed right past it, because really I understand. There’s a huge rift between literary writers and genre writers, and although I’m now on the genre side, I wasn’t always.

When I was in college, I bought into the idea that in order to write anything worthwhile, I had to write something literary. It was the idea espoused by all around me, all my professors — the very first grown-up, professional authors I had met. And I was too young and naive to understand that the view they were putting forth was not the view of the Community of Grown Up and Professional Authors. It was the view of the Academic Community.

When I entered college, I wanted to write science fiction.  It took them about one year to convince me I had to write literary, and I spent about nine years (!) doing it.  I read Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Awards every year.  I subscribed to the New Yorker.  I met a lot of truly awesome friends in the literary scene, including the writing group I’m still part of today.  During this time I also wrote some decent stories, but there’s only about one I’d now proudly display to my friends.  Partly this is because, well, I was just a young writer.  But I think it is also partly because I was trying to write stuff that didn’t really get me jazzed.

What finally jolted me out of this literary mindset was NaNoWriMo, the online challenge where people sign up to write a novel (or 50,000 words) in a month.  Something about the excess and sheer wonderful craziness of the idea let me decide to try something genre.  After all, it was an insane challenge.  I wasn’t going to really produce something worthwhile.  And therefore I could try something fun.

That book became my first, unpublished novel, Murder 101: Introduction to Death.  Even after I finished it, I thought of my foray into genre work as a diversion, a way to jumpstart my career.  But not (no, never!) the real meat of my career.  No, that had to be literary.  It was probably another two years before I gave up on the idea of being a literary writer altogether.

And doing that made me happy.  Not wildly, ecstatically happy–just content.  At peace.

But I have been on the literary side of the fence for too long to expect all my friends to understand completely.  Outlander wasn’t being a jerk when he asked me whether genre writers cared about prose; he was just expressing the belief of his community.  Literary writers tend to believe that genre writers don’t care about good prose, that they don’t care about meaning or nuance or writing something “real.”  You can hear their attitude in the term they sometimes use to describe literary fiction:  “serious fiction.”  As though genre writing were inherently silly.

Similarly, genre writers tend to believe that literary writers don’t care about plot, or tension, or actually telling a cohesive story.  They believe that literary writers like to wade around in a marsh of emotion without giving the reader something they can hang onto and clearly understand.  In their own way, they believe that literary writers are not “serious –” serious about story, about structure, about scene.

I’ll tell you a little secret:  there’s some truth to both these sides.  Genre writers do care more about plot than prose, and literary writers do care more about prose than plot. But both groups do care about both things; both groups are earnestly trying to put out the best books, the very best books that they can.

And that is the way of things.  And though I am glad both kinds of fiction exist, I am happy to find myself on the genre side of the fence.  It’s the side that’s never going to get me access to the Nobel or the New Yorker.  It’s the side that’s not likely to pave my way into book clubs or high society galas.  But it’s the side, I guess, where I’m comfortable.  Frankly, it’s the side where I think I’ve always been meant to be.

And yes, I do care more about plot than prose.

Hello, and welcome to my new home at www.SimpleMystery.com.  I’d like to thank you all for making the trip.  And special thanks to Kelly and Leigh Anne, who gave me the fodder for this first post in the new digs.

For my last post at my old address I opened the floor to questions, and here’s what I got:

From Kelly: Where do you see yourself in two years?  In five?  Ten?

Whew, big question.  I mean, there’s a lot of categories to cover, right?  Career, family, etc.  Let’s dive in.

In two years, I’d like to be a published author, and also a mother.  I’d like to be a better cook by this time also.  I’d like to be making most of my meals from scratch, and making good use of my freezer.  Basically, two-years-from-now Jane is just me, only slightly improved in every area.  The big question that remains is: will I be living in Atlanta still or not?  Although I like it, Atlanta doesn’t feel completely like home.  I can’t really say whether we’ll still be here in two years.  I would be happy with either answer.

In five years, I hope I’ll be working on the third or fourth sequel to my current book.  Also on the first or second sequel to my first kid.  By this time I would hope that I’ll have an inkling of how my publishing career is going to play out:  am I going to be a bestseller?  A midlist?  Of course, I’m hoping for the former.  By this time, I suspect Mark and I will have moved on to our second house, probably not in Atlanta.  Some places we have talked about:  Austin, and the research triangle in North Carolina.  Once again, pulling for the former.

In ten years, I guess whatever kids I am going to have will be had.  I hope to still be working on the same mystery series.  Maybe it’s naive to think I’ll be able to stay interested in, and devoted to, a single project for a decade or more–but believe it or not, I actually have loose plans for the series up through this point.  Book 14 is totally going to knock your socks off.

And from Leigh Anne: What is the one book I should read next?

So, this gets at something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while now: the dichotomy (some might say war) between literary fiction and genre fiction.  Like, should I recommend to you something uplifting and meaningful and full of artistic cachet?  Or just something I really enjoyed?  ‘Cause my rep’s on the line, right?  A writer, with a writing blog, gets asked for a book recommendation, and you can’t help but judge her a little bit by what she chooses.

Well, lately I am in a place where I just want to talk about the things I love, literary merit be damned.  And so I will suggest something totally offbeat: Fables: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham.  This one is decidedly in the “I just loved the pants off it” category.  It’s fun, fantastical, and a graphic novel to boot. It’s about all the characters you remember from fairy tales: Snow White, Prince Charming, the Big Bad Wolf.  They’re living in hiding in New York, and … oh, just read it.

Also from Leigh Anne: How did my sister, Kate, wind up on ESPN?

She was in the audience for what was apparently one hell of a basketball game.

Thanks for the questions, guys.  Join me next time, when I revisit this whole literary/genre conflict.

Ok, I confess, that was a bit of a tease. Yes, it is the hundredth post. And it is sort of the final one. Because for post 101, I’ll be moving this blog over to my new website, www.simplemystery.com. Because, let’s face it: www.all-about-the-book.blogspot.com? What was I thinking?

But in the meantime, I’m going to swipe an idea from my pal Kelly and use this hundredth post to solicit questions from the audience. Anything you want to ask me about, I’ll do my best to answer in the next post. Questions about writing welcome, questions about anything else welcome as well. I sort of doubt I have many lurkers, except maybe my Dad, but if I do, this would be a great time to delurk!

See you on the flip side,

Jane

So, it’s a new year all over again. And since we’re changing the penultimate digit this time around, I’m thinking less about everything that’s changed in 2009 and more about everything that’s changed since 2000.

When 2000 rolled around it was, if you’ll recall, a big damn deal. I’m talking pomp and circumstance, and dancing in the streets. Remember… hee hee… Y2K? I was just twenty-two, spending a good chunk of my time resenting my awesome job at a newspaper because they expected me to spend so much more time on it than I’d ever had to spend on college.

And then here it was: 2000. A big freakin’ number that said clearly that we were moving forward into the future, that this was a Day to Be Marked. It never honestly occurred to me that I’d even be seeing New Years Eve 2010. I mean, I expected to, but only in the way that you expect to die someday. It was a length of time I really couldn’t envision.

But here I am. And I’m a different me. In evidence of which, I offer these pictures.

These are the shoes I wore on New Year’s Eve 2000. I wore them around downtown Fort Worth, in the midst of a rockin’, rollin’ Texas-style celebration. They hurt my feet, my toes nearly froze off, and I spent all night worried that I’d scrape through that thin sheen of blue to reveal the papier mache or whatever was underneath.

And here are the shoes I wore this year:

I wore them in my living room, while Mark and I watched a Burn Notice marathon, then switched to the Times Square ball drop for the last five minutes. We toasted with half a can of Coke apiece, kissed, spoke of our undying love and fidelity, and then got back to Burn Notice. Full disclosure: I was also wearing socks at the time.

So what those shoes are saying, I guess, is that things change–sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better, and often for both.

That’s how my life has been, but much more on the better side than the worse. I’ve got a decade less of life to run with here in 2010, not to mention fertility and facial elasticity. But I’ve also got a husband and a life I love. And I think (I hope) I’m more a bit wiser now, a bit more generous, more patient.

What I’m not, and what I would have expected to be by now, is finished.

I’m not finished figuring out how to be the person I want to be. How to be disciplined, and courageous, and stylish, and organized. Nor am I established in my career. By any measure, I’m farther along than when this millennium started, but I am not there.

And because I’m 2010 me, and not 2000 me, I’m old enough to know that maybe you never really get finished. Maybe it’s all really about the journey

Or maybe that’s malarkey, but here are a few things I know:

1. The 2010 me likes comfortable shoes and doesn’t care who knows it.
2. Burn Notice is very, very good.
3. The optimism I felt at the beginning of 2000 is nothing like the optimism I have now. And I think that’s because I’ve got the right companion for 2010.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Take a look at this snap of the Teen section at the good ol’ B&N and tell me if you see what I see.

I see a metric ton of red, black, and purple. A good assortment of chillingly beautiful, yet otherworldly faces. And confirmation that vampires aren’t just a thing in teen fiction anymore; they’re The Thing.

This, my friends, is the power of marketing, and of storytelling. Between them, Stephanie Meyer and her publisher have moved an entire generation. I predict we’ll be seeing ripples of this effect in adult fiction for years to come.