Opinions, Please

I’m still wresting with the title for my fourth Sebastian St. Cyr Regency mystery. The first books in the series are WHAT ANGELS FEAR, WHEN GODS DIE, and WHY MERMAIDS SING. You see the pattern, right? What/When/Where/Why followed by noun followed by verb. I like all three of those titles and they came effortlessly when I was first plotting out the series. My problem is the title for the fourth book. It just won’t gel.

The mystery centers around the murder of eight prostitutes, one of whom was more than what she seemed—in fact, she was the daughter of an English lord. The suspects include her fiancé, her brother, her father, a brothel owner, a river thief, and a magistrate. Also involved is a certain historical event that provides the twist at the end. The core of the book is essentially the idea that this young girl was betrayed by those who should have loved her and protected her (yes, we are talking incest).

My original title—WHERE DRAGONS LIVE—won’t work because it sounds like a fantasy. My alternate—WHERE DEMONS SLEEP—sounds like a paranormal. I played with the nouns “serpents” and “devils”, but now I’m leaning towards “virgins”.

So, opinions, please. Out of the following, which do you prefer: WHERE VIRGINS KEEP, WHERE VIRGINS SLEEP, WHERE VIRGINS LIE?

Any other suggestions will be warmly welcomed!

A Different Attitude Toward Life and Death

One of my hobbies is genealogy. I don’t have much time for it these days, but a chance cyber meeting with a distant relative in Germany motivated me to spend a few hours this weekend rummaging around old nineteenth-century New Orleans birth and death records. It was a sobering experience.

I’m a historian. I know the death rate in New Orleans was twice as high as that of other American cities, thanks to yellow fever and malaria and all the other nasties that used to flourish in subtropical cities. But nothing quite beats reading actual cemetery records. Consider this run from St. Joseph’s Cemetery from a random stretch in 1871:

1 Jan, Joseph Dudley, 1yr5mo, spasms; Charles Weber, 18m, cerebral inflammation; 2 Jan, male child of Annie Gerdes, 1 day, debility; 3 Jan, son of Judge Daly, still born; Joseph Hall, 6 days, tris. noscentium; Joseph Blake, 37 yrs, gunshot wound…

After reading a few years of this, anyone with any empathy is left gasping with agony for those who buried all these babies, all these children, all these young wives and young men. (The gunshot wound is actually a rarity.) One is left wondering, how did anyone survive? And then the inevitable sequel to that thought is, How did those left alive cope will all this death?

As someone who writes historical novels, it was a sobering experience. I found myself looking at the marriage record of a young woman and then her death record some 16 months later in childbirth, and thinking, How many mothers watched their daughters get married and trembled, knowing how easily they might soon lose them to death in childbirth? Or what about the anxious new mother, holding her baby and knowing how easily every little sniffle, every little tummy ache could lead to another trip to the family tomb?

Some causes of death were familiar—lockjaw, burns, consumption, meningitis, pneumonia, gastro enteritis, scarlet fever; others were strange 19th diagnoses—pthisis pulmonalis, pyasmia, marasmus, albuminaria, congestion of the brain, acute nephrotes. A thousand different ways to die. But the question is still, How did those who survived managed to go on living and laughing and making love? How did they create this city that became know as “the city that care forgot” and “the Big Easy”? The obvious answer is, That’s how they coped with all that suffering and sorrow and death. They threw themselves back into life with an abandonment that lingers in their descendents today.

I have a picture of a stern-faced old woman sitting on an old-fashioned couch. Her name is Caroline Holderith Wegmann, and she immigrated from the Bas Rhin region to New Orleans in 1870 at the age of 16. She raised seven children but buried another four. I keep her picture by my desk as a reminder. Whenever I’m tempted to feel sorry for my self or to wine that life is sooo hard, she sits there and tells me I’m her great-granddaughter, and I’m made of sterner stuff.

How Do You Save Your Chapters?

I’m doing something new with the two books I’m currently writing. I’m only actively working on the fourth Sebastian mystery at the moment, but I have the second thriller at proposal stage (about 80 pages, which is long for my proposals), so technically I’m writing two books. Anyway, I’m taking a new approach to the way I save my chapters. Why? Well, I wasn’t happy with my old method.

Yonkers ago, when I first started writing historical romances, I saved each chapter as a separate document. It did not work well. I was always dividing old chapters that grew too long into two or three shorter chapters, inserting new chapters, moving chapters, renumbering chapters… In other words, it was a royal pain and often a confused mess. Then I sold my first book and my publisher wanted my book on disk, saved in ten chapter chunks. I complied and began saving my chapters that way when I wrote.

It worked slightly better, but only slightly. What was originally saved as “Chapters 21-30” frequently became in reality something like Chapters 23-34. Still a confused—and confusing—mess.

My newest publisher wants my thrillers on a CD saved as only one document. Slamming it all together was, predictably, a pain, and probably helped motivate me to rethink what I was doing. I’m not about to save my work in progress as one single document—I find 400 pages simply too unwieldy. But I’ve come up with a scheme that holds out promise of being much more manageable.

I’m dividing my new books into chunks that I’ve called, for lack of a better term, Acts. Not the structured acts of Aristotle or even Syd Fields, but my own Acts. Basically I’m dividing the book into story blocks that are distinct in some way. Each Act ends at a turning point in the story. Because these turning points are fairly set by the plot, I don’t anticipate I’ll be doing much shifting of chapters between Acts. And because these sections are simply labeled Act One, Act Two, etc, it won’t matter if I add, divide, or delete chapters within them.

So far, it seems to be working well. I don’t know why I clung to my old method for so long. I’m beginning to think that after one has been writing for a certain length of time, it’s a good idea to change some habits, shake things up, come at this métier from a slightly different angle.

So how about you? How do you save your chapters?

Are You Impressed Yet?

According to the March 2007 Library and Information Update, one third of readers surveyed said they read “challenging literature” in order to be perceived as being well read, even though they couldn’t follow what the book was about. One half said reading classics makes people look more intelligent, while forty percent lied about having read certain books. Another survey found that half of their respondents admitted to having bought a book simply to leave it lying around the house looking impressive.

Topping the list of books people admitted they bluffed about having read: Lord of the Rings, War and Peace, Withering Heights, 1984, Harry Potter, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, The Da Vinci Code, and The Diary of Anne Frank.

If you think that’s scary, think about this: these are the honest liars. How many people buy books to impress their friends or claim to read books they haven’t, yet don’t admit it?

Judging a Book by its Cover

As a writer, few things cause me as much angst as my books’ covers. Why? Because a book’s cover is constantly cited as one of the most important factors influencing a reader’s decision to pick it up. Yet ironically it’s the one aspect of a book in which writers have the least input.

Titles are also important, and in some genres a writer has almost no influence there either. I wrote seven romance novels and NOT ONE went to press with my original title or even one of my first half dozen alternate suggestions. I seem to have better luck with my mystery and thriller titles. So far all my Sebastian St. Cyr books have gone to press with their original titles intact. My thriller title stuck as well.

But it’s now cover conference time for THE ARCHANGEL PROJECT, which means I’m starting to fret. The decisions being made in that anonymous room up in New York could very well make a difference between this book’s success and oblivion. Sometimes art departments turn in stunning results—WHY MERMAIDS SING, for instance. And then there are the dogs. The cover of WHEN GODS DIE was a severe disappointment. But since ARCHANGEL is my first thriller, I don’t know what to expect.

We actually started down this road a few months ago, then Harper Collins bailed because they hadn’t decided yet whether they wanted to bring ARCHANGEL out in hardcover or as a paperback original (and that makes a difference, it seems, in the cover). Steve and I did “thriller cover research” and were amused to realize that thriller covers are as stereotypic as romance covers. A thriller or suspense novel typically has either a woman in a dress and heels or a man in a suit running down a shadowy street. Sometimes the man is walking, but if so, then he must be in a trench coat. If the book doesn’t take place in a city, then we have a stark, scary scene of rural menace.

There are a few book covers that break this mold, but they are rare. Why? Because publishers think readers are stupid. The woman in heels running down a dark street tells readers This Is A THRILLER, just as a shadowy historical street scene tells readers This Is a Historical Mystery. The fear is that if publishers stick a different cover on a book, readers looking for a thriller or historical mystery won’t recognize it.

Yet the Da Vinci Code had a great, different cover and I’ve no doubt it contributed much to the book’s success (that and the largest marketing push in publishing history). A recent informal survey of mystery readers revealed that most historical mystery readers actually don’t even know that dark historical street scene covers are a clue they should be looking for. Of course, everyone in the world knows that a “clinch” cover is shorthand for romance. Romance writers complained about those covers for years, but publishers clung to them because they were convinced they’d lose readers if they tried something different. Then they tried something different and, lo and behold, books with innovative covers sold better. Who’d have thunk?

The funny thing is, even though I know better, I find I still judge a book by its cover, at least initially. An eye-catching cover and an intriguing title will lure me to pick up a book. I’ll then read the blurb and, if I think it sounds interesting, I’ll read the first few pages to get a feel for a writer’s style. If that appeals to me, I’ll buy the book. But that first step—reaching out and taking the book in my hand—is provoked by the title and the cover. And that’s a scary thought.