Resonance

There’s a technique we use in writing to underscore character development or change: we show the same person saying the same thing or performing the same action at different times in the book, and it’s a nice, subtle way of allowing the changes that have taken place to resonate with the reader.

I had that resonance in my own life yesterday, when we were painting Sam’s room. It has now been five and a half years since my girls and I moved here to New Orleans from Australia. We bought this house, which was a nice house but needed a fair amount of work. The girls and I painted the entire inside, including ceilings. We were staying at my mother’s house at the time, and we would come over in the morning, put on a CD—usually Enrique Iglesias’s first album, since it was one of the few things we could agree on—and tackle one room after the other. The very first room we painted was Sam’s.

Yesterday, Sam, Danielle and I painted Sam’s room, which suffered some damage when the roof went. Sam brought over her Ipod, plugged it in, and said, “I know what we’re going to listen to.” I was up on a ladder cutting in when the first chords began to play. For one brief instant the moment shifted, and we were back in time, my two girls and I, listening to Enrique and painting our new house.

We all laughed, and then the laughter faded as we each thought, inevitably, about the changes that have taken place in our lives in the last five and a half years. When last we painted that room, I was a single romance writer with two children, one eleven, one fifteen. Today I’m writing mysteries and thrillers; I have one daughter about to go off to Yale Law and another starting her senior year in high school. I also have a new husband I hadn’t even met five years ago, while the house and the city around us…well, you know all about that.

Resonance. Useful in life as well as in fiction.

On Mermaids and Windows

After a week of distractions too numerous to mention, I was finally planning to start today on the second hundred pages of my historical mystery, WHY MERMAIDS SING. I’m already a week behind on my month’s quota, but I just reread the last hundred pages and decided, Hey, that’s not so bad after all. I was ready to charge forward...and then I got a call telling me our new windows were being installed today. Love that advance notice.

They were supposed to be here at 9:00. They showed up at 11:00. I spent the intervening hours sorting through boxes of books, putting some back on the bookcases that are ready, so the time wasn’t entirely lost.

Taking out old windows—even broken, twisted ones—makes a lot of noise. And quite a mess, too. So far today I have typed, CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

It’s a conspiracy.

What I’m reading… Just started a new thriller, but I’m enjoying it. His writing style has a lovely old-fashioned feel to it, as opposed to the breakneck, TV-inspired pacing that has become all too common and which I personally find rather dissatisfying.

What Once Was

For some years now we’ve made our weekly grocery shopping expedition into a family outing. Every week, usually on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, we take my mother and however many daughters are in town at the time, and head for the Whole Foods at Magazine and Arabella. We have dinner outside if the weather permits (which it usually does), then split up to fill our grocery carts.

There used to be a shop on Carrolton, near Tulane Avenue, that we’d pass every week. It reminded me of something you’d see in a Middle Eastern souk or an African market: cheap vinyl bags hanging up for sale on the sidewalk, garishly colored polyester rugs displayed over a nearby fence. I used to smile every time I’d see it, and wonder about the immigrant who’d obviously opened it, and about his customers. The first time I drove up Carrolton after Katrina, I looked for the shop and saw it shuttered, an ugly water line some three or four feet high across the front of the building. And I wondered again about the dark skinned man who’d once hung all his wares for sale out on the sidewalk, and what had happened to him.

Most of the shops in the area were hit badly by the storm, especially the groceries. When Steve, Danielle and I first moved back down here in October, people were lining up in the streets for the distribution of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat, the modern version of army C Rations). Since we try to avoid preservatives, we decided to drive up to Baton Rouge once a week to have dinner and shop at the Whole Foods up there. We became quite friendly with the staff at the pasta and seafood counters, giving them weekly updates on the reconstruction of our house and the repopulation of the city, while they would pass on to us reports on the progress of the reconstruction of New Orleans’ two Whole Foods.

The Whole Foods on Veterans was the first to reopen—sort of. They cleared out a small section near the door, lined up three or four short aisles sparsely stocked with food, hung big sheets of plastic to seal off the rest of the store, and set up two cash registers on card tables at the front. It was like stepping into a time warp back to the old USSR. Every few weeks they’d expand a bit, with the meal service area being the last to reopen in February. The Whole Foods on Magazine took a different approach, staying closed until they were ready to reopen entirely, also in February. We were some of their first customers.

I thought about those days as we set off on our weekly grocery outing last night. It seems as if we’ve been back in our old weekly Grocery Night Out routine for some time now, although it’s actually only been a few months. There used to be an old Victorian house across the street from the sidewalk tables on Magazine. A fortuneteller lived there. While I ate my dinner, I used look at her little neon sign hanging in the window of that Victorian house and smile. The house is gone now, bulldozed after a significant chunk of the Whole Foods roof slammed into it. Last night, while we were having dinner, my mother looked across the street and said, “It’s amazing how nature can reclaim the land. Look at that. You’d never know there’d ever been a house there.” I turned and saw a thicket of weeds and shrubs where once a fortuneteller had practiced her art.

On our way home, we drove up Carrolton and I watched, as I always do, for signs of rebuilding, my heart aching at the sight of so many abandoned homes and businesses standing forlorn in the fading light. And then I saw them: row after row of cheap vinyl bags, garish polyester rugs. I cried, “Look! He’s back! The souk guy is back!”

And then I thought, This is how it will be. In some places, weeds will overgrow what once was. But in other places, the human spirit will prevail, and what once was will be again.

Audio Books: How Bad Does It Have to Be Before You Hit Eject?

I’ve been thinking about audio books versus the paper versions. I just finished listening to a book I never would have finished if I’d been reading it. Reading a book requires me to pick it up time and again or continue reading through distractions, while listening to a book in my car simply obliges me to resist hitting a button to change to a radio station.

I actually had decided to quit listening to this particular book—a mystery thriller—but then forgot to get something else when I drove up to the lake house to meet the electrician the other day. So I ended up finishing it after all. Not entirely a waste of time, since one can learn much from a poorly executed book.

This book was interesting because the writer did some things very, very well, even though she did other things so badly. I wonder if the things that irritated me—the unrealistic characters, the self-obsessed heroine—would have irritated other readers. The heroine was supposed to have been a rebellious little rich girl wild child who became a cop. I had a really hard time swallowing that. (FBI agent, maybe; but a common cop?) Worse, she was a narcotics agent. The wild children I knew in my misspent youth hated all cops, but reserved a particular contempt for “narcs.” So that aspect of the book kept yanking my “I don’t believe this” response, which kept pulling me out of the story. Worse, the devices that were intended to make me sympathetic to the heroine kept irritating me—it reached the point that I was groaning every time she started contemplating suicide and staring at herself naked in front of a mirror.

Most of the other characters in the book were not so much characters as caricatures. The over-tanned Florida Jew with the New York accent and the cigarette hanging out of her mouth, the oily European who kept talking about “stupid Americans,” the “overfed” teenager—in fact, I was about halfway through the book when I realized that the only characters the writer had respect for were the heroine and one little girl. Even the two dogs and the cat in the story were portrayed as obnoxious. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

The author of this disaster has been hitting the New York Times bestseller lists for a good ten years now, yet she still sprinkles her book with dozens and dozens of clichés: heavy as lead, spinning like a top, bright as a new penny. I kept wondering what happened to her editor’s red pencil. But by far the most serious flaw was the story’s complete lack of surprise. No plot twists, nothing unexpected until the final twist at the end, which was indeed a twist but failed by being unbelievable.

All of which has made me think a lot about the importance of respecting my characters, and maintaining surprise and freshness in my stories. Always useful reminders. But the next book I listen to is going to be something well done, that I can enjoy.

Writing in a Post-Katrina Life

Even under normal conditions it takes me a year to write a book. I don’t have a day job—writing is my day job. I’m just painfully slow.

Coming up with the idea, building it to outline stage, then writing the synopsis and first 30-50 pages is the hardest part. That usually takes about three months. Even though I’m now writing a series, I’m always doing research. I enjoy research. More time. Once I start writing the book itself, I try to write 5 pages a day. Theoretically, that works out to 25 pages a week, 100 pages a month, so I should be able to finish the first draft in another 4 months. It never happens.

Some days I can sit at the computer for 6-8 hours and produce less than a page of usable text (a lot of unusable prose goes in the trash or simply gets deleted). But even when the writing is going well, other stuff gets in the way. I always have revisions on my previous book to do, and those can take a month or even two. The first time I read through my editor’s suggestions, I usually feel like slashing my wrists. Impossible! I can’t do that! Sure it would make it a better book, but how the %$#@ am I supposed to do it? After a while, I calm down as it all becomes clear. But implementing that vision takes time.

Then, just when I’m back into my Work In Progress and things are going well, I get another package from New York: the copyedited manuscript to review. Then come the galley proofs. Both take a surprising amount of time to review carefully (and it’s an agony, because at this point I think, If I have to read this book again, I’m going to throw up).

And then there’s my family. I actually think I had more time to write when my children were little. I hear about writers who lock their office door and tell their kids, “Don’t interrupt me unless you set the house on fire or someone is seriously bleeding.” Maybe they have boys. With girls, there are times when the need to talk is far more important than mere blood. And then there are the lessons and practices. Lots and lots of lessons and practices.

I also have a garden that needs to be watered, weeded, and trimmed (it’s my therapy), and a mother who goes to the doctor a lot (and she’s healthy). I have cats that throw up, piles of laundry that can swallow the house if I’m not diligent. Sometimes I think, how do other people hold down real jobs and still manage to get all this done? It’s a mystery to me. It’s one of the reasons I love my job. Yes, I stress about print runs and reviews and covers, but I’m also doing something I love, and I’m doing it on my own schedule.

The problem is, in this post-Katrina world, my schedule is upside down. I had a goal to reach page 100 of WHY MERMAIDS SING by May 31. I made it to page 103, so I’m feeling pretty good. It’s not polished—I gave myself permission to turn out what writers call “a shitty first draft.” But at least it’s sitting there, all printed out. Today, June 1, I start my second hundred pages. It’s also, by the way, the beginning of hurricane season.

The book is due 1 November.