Wistful (kinda) rhymes with Mistletoe

by Sophie





Holidays




If you ever doubted that holidays are all about traditions, go get yourself a couple of teenagers. Their awkward loping famished selves will confound you with their refusal to conform to any standard, expectation, or societal norm 360 days of the year, but just try changing one tiny little detail of your family holiday practices and prepare to be run over in a raging whirlwind of adolescent angst.

Put a plaid bow over the fireplace instead of the red velvet...try a new stuffing recipe for Thanksgiving...serve a frittata for Christmas breakfast instead of cinnamon rolls. Go ahead, try it - and then stick your fingers in your ears to protect them when your little sugars scream -

"BUT THAT'S NOT THE WAY WE ALWAYS DO IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Well, I've learned that lesson. Yes ma'am, I dutifully drag all the boxes down from the attic and follow the holiday blueprint from years past, and it's all worth it too, for that sparkly little moment when the kids wander into the living room on Christmas morning and for a moment - if you squint - you can see them standing there in their footy pajamas, dragging their teddy bears along the floor.

Traditions glue one year to the next, and ease the passing of time and the relationship of all our past selves with the present and future ones. But inevitably there comes a day when it's time for change. Everything changes - we don't doubt it, but for some of us the transition is more demanding, more raw, more shattering than for others. I don't do change well...but even I can see, looking through the wrong end of the telescope, the one that makes close-up things look very far away, that change can be good.

Do you remember when you were a young adult, spending your first holiday away from home? Maybe you were with friends or a lover, in a strange town. Maybe you couldn't afford much. Maybe you were a little more homesick than you cared to admit, but I bet there was a moment when you realized hey - I can do this. Even without the gold star your dad always put on the top of the tree - the Willie Nelson Christmas cassette - the cookies your mom made with the rolling pin from Poland - - even without any of that, it was still Christmas, and it was still magic.


I remember standing a little forlornly in my first high-rise apartment watching my fiance rig up our tree and thinking of everything I missed, when he said "Well, we'll just start our own traditions." He came home the next day with a $14.99 ceramic nativity set from Ben Franklin and we set it up on the coffee table. I thought it was funny. It was badly painted and tacky and I figured I'd start collecting a real set - you know, the Wedgwood set you buy piece by piece over two decades - as soon as we had a little money.


But that never quite happened. We moved around, we grew up, we had kids. Every year I got that box out, with its cast-styrofoam bed that the pieces molded right into, and set up the nativity with a three-dollar bag of raffia "hay" from Michaels. Every year I put it away in January, shaking my head and thinking how I really had to find something nicer for next year.

But then suddenly twenty years went by, and that ugly set had pride of place every December. It was as much a part of the holiday as the stockings I sewed myself or the handprint plaster preschool ornaments. I am certain that my kids would be horrified if I ever suggested replacing the awkward misfired plaster wise men and camels and baby Jesus with stately bone china.

Until they find themselves out on their own one day. It won't be so many years now. The thought makes me terribly sad in a way; I can't imagine Christmas without them. But I'm excited for them too. They'll miss that ugly old nativity, but they have their own discoveries to make.

Pens in Action

Three little pens went off to Bouchercon, the largest mystery convention, in Indianapolis last weekend. Did they get into some hijinx? Hmm, perhaps.

It all started when they roomed together.

Juliet, Gigi, and Sophie

Later Sophie stole Brett Battles' brand new Barry award for Best Thriller Ever. (Juliet tried to stop her.)

Steve Hockensmith tried to get them in line by using his stern, no-nonsense look but Mary Saums encouraged the gals not to be intimidated.

Oh dear, there's Juliet again, this time hanging out in a bar with Jen Forbus and Brett again. Watch out for the deer heads and Christmas lights, Juliet!

Meanwhile Sophie tried out a new look. (Too bad she stole the glasses...new friend Libby nabbed them back.)

In the end, our heroines had a lovely time and missed the rest of the Pens muchly.

I Aim To Join the Women's Horror Club

by Sophie Littlefield

BLOOD

This time of year, I love to pick up an unapologetically creepy horror novel and shudder my way through it. I love horror, and consumed the usual amounts of Stephen King, particularly the short stories, when I was a kid. Since then, I haven't read as much horror, but that is changing. After consuming HEART-SHAPED BOX in a couple of breathless days, I moved on to Joe Hill's short story collection, and that re-ignited my old fondness for the genre.

It's been exciting to discover women who are writing what I have, probably ill-advisedly, dubbed "girl horror." (That is a terrible term for many reasons, not the least of which is we don't need to give men any more encouragement to disregard books written by women.) What I mean by that is a story that is character-driven first and foremost; in which the plot is inextricably linked to the characters (meaning it would not unspool the same way with a different cast - hey, that was pretty smart, wasn't it? I just came up with that but I think I'll start using it); in which sensory details run a broader spectrum than those associated with terror (this richness makes for a far more ambiguous and thus more interesting novel); and in which relationships change as a result of the psychological response to horror, not just to the events themselves.

The first such author I encountered was Alex Sokoloff. Avid blog readers already know Alex for her essays on writing and craft. The same year I met Alex, I also met Rhodi Hawk, whose horror novel will be out shortly; I am looking forward to it.
And the following year I met Laura Benedict, whose novels exemplify the creepy/character mix I really enjoy. Other women on my horror TBR pile include Sarah Langan and Sara Gran.

That's by no means meant to be a complete list, and I'd love to hear suggestions from you. One group of writers that deserves more attention is those who write in the short story form.
Cemetery Dance and The Shroud, among others, publish women authors who do a commendable job of stretching the limits of what we consider horror.
I have been writing horror short stories for several years, but only recently did I place one. It will appear in a print anthology edited by David Cranmer - I'll keep y'all posted.

Save For Later - the Second-Biggest Lie

By Sophie


The biggest lie told by many grown-up ladies is not, in fact, "oh my gracious, that's the most astonishing man-tool I've ever encountered." That's just a little warm-up lie we use for practice before we get around to the hard work of bearing children. At that point we have to roll out the serious artillery, because - as every mother knows - lying to your kids is an art that takes practice and dedication and finesse.

Here's the thing. Kids want things. They want stuff from the moment they get out of bed in the morning ("where are my ankle-zipper jeans - doesn't anyone ever do laundry around here?") until they lay their precious heads on the pillow at night ("I'm already mostly asleep - can't you bring me a glass of water so I don't have to wake back up?")

Most times, a heartfelt "hell no" will do the trick. But sometimes their pleas merit a bit more robust response, like when they actually have a point, when what they are asking for is within the realm of reasonable.

Often, however, it just ain't convenenient.

Which necessitates The Mother's Lie: I'll talk to your father about that.

...And get back to you, is the implication there. As though when Bob walks in the door at the end of the day I'll be like, "Honey, Junior wants me to join the Academic Boosters like all the moms who care about their children's educations. What do you think, yea or nay?" - or "We're out of milk and toilet paper - do you suppose one of us should run to the store?"


....when I know darn well that I won't do anything of the sort. Yup, I'll talk to your father about that is the circular file of parental responses.


Which reminds me of the 2nd-most-oft-uttered lie around here, which is called into service any time I have to cut big chunks of text:


I'll use this section later.


Now I have to pause here to say that I feel kind of bad for Juliet, because what follows is cribbed directly from discussions we've been having on the road (we're in between cities on our book tour - Sunday was Phoenix, Thursday is L.A. etc.) Once I'm done here she won't have a darn thing to say, because we're in complete agreement on the subject.


(Though that's the perk to being the Monday girl: everything's fresh snow. I get to make tracks in any direction I want and there's nothing any of the other Pens can do about it. Which makes me feel gleeful...kinda makes me want to yell "Die Hard, Die Hard, Die Hard!" facing due West toward the outer limits of the city where a certain Pen can only jump up and down in impotent fury...ah, love that!)


What were we talking about...oh, yeah. So writers write merrily along, building and shaping the story as they go, and eventually the day comes when they put that last period in place and go on a celebratory bender only to come back in the cold dawn and realize that it's revision time. Which means fixing what's broke and, when things are too broke to fix - or, more often, too irrelevant to fix - yanking sections out.


And that hurts. It hurts and burns and makes us feel all empty inside, because, see, it's always the sections you loved the best that have to go. Even if it was boring prose before, the minute you have to yank it out, it all turns brilliant. It's like when the quiet boy in your math class falls hard for you in seventh grade and you spurn him for several months until the day he realizes he actually loves some other girl and suddenly he's the cutest boy in the school and you will die without him. Yes, it's just like that.


Sometimes, cutting out that section makes the words and sentences left behind seem lifeless and dull, and you begin to panic because you've just removed the only bits that ever elevated your story in the first place. But wait, it's okay, because you've got this Word file you've started. If you're me, it's called Save For Later or some equally helpful thing. Just knowing it's there, tucked side by side with the manuscript on your hard drive, lets you resume breathing and revise another day.


But do you ever come back to the file?


No. Never. NE-VER. Not in a million years. Not if you were told to increase your word count from 80,000 to 800,000,000 - even then, you would never return to that sad little file. I don't really know why it is - and maybe the other Pens can figure it out - but those words are tainted now, and their file home is really a quarantine, or more accurately a tomb. Like the haunted house of childhood nightmares, words go marching in, but they never come out again.


I just re-read and realized that today's post might be one of the most extravagantly, irresponsibly directionless things I've written in ages. I apologize...see, my book just came out and its launch turned out to be a little more demanding than I expected. I'm playing the Newbie Card and hoping for forgiveness...

Channeling Cass, Who Eats to Live

By Sophie

I'm a terrible terrible junk food addict, as the Pens know (especially those who roomed with me in D.C. and got dragged along for McDonalds runs). My taste in, well, taste is lowbrow and well-larded with lard.

I'm not into the sugar so much, but sprinkle salt on just about anything and deep-fry it and we're good. Potato chips are my core food, in particular those sturdy kettle-style salt-and-pepper deals. But I also adore hush puppies, clam fritters, onion rings, catfish, anything at all from the Frito-Lay folks....

(It turns out that both LGC's people - the English - and my people - the Poles - make a version of stale bread fried in bacon fat. Global delicious!)

This has worked out okay for me, surprisingly. I force myself to eat a decent diet, packing away the required fruits and veggies and so forth before prowling the larder late at night for sodium-rich foodstuffs composed of polyunsaturated fats. I don't even have to compete with the kids, because in a freakish departure from the family genes, they don't like junk food. (A shameful memory of mine is yelling at my then-eight-year-old, "You better eat that whole damn cupcake or no apple for you!")

However, change has come to Sophietown.

Starting last week, my diet underwent a dramatic overhaul. I'm eating for sustenance. Food as fuel - consumed indifferently, on the run, chosen for dietary efficacy and without a thought to palate appeal. Cereal and yogurt and fruit for breakfast, a simple sandwich or salad for lunch and dinner.

This isn't a diet and I don't care if I lose weight. Any improvement in my cholesterol or blood pressure or BMI will be unintended.

Because it's all about becoming Cass.

Cass Dollar is the heroine of my next book. I'm not sayin' much about her, because that will jinx the project, but Cass is a haunted young woman who views her body variously as a vehicle and an encumbrance and a ticking bomb. Cass is hardly a sensualist - her world is a lean and daunting place, and she neither seeks nor indulges pleasure of any kind, and certainly not when it comes to food.

I've never tried "method" writing before - the idea of being the character, at least during writing hours. But this project seems right for it. I feel a real affinity for poor Cass (don't worry, she has a redemptive arc and by the end of the book she'll probably be downing jelly donuts and champagne and dancing through sprinklers or something) and I want to understand who she is as clearly as I can, at least in the early days of the draft.

(Note that I just gave myself an out there. "Early days of the draft," I said, which is code for "if I really need a Dorito then all bets are off.")

Love the Brown Blobs

by Sophie


It astonishes me that there are people in this world who believe they are not creative.

“I can’t draw,” they insist. Not so. Anyone can pick up a pencil and make marks on paper. What they mean is “I can’t draw well,” where “well” represents what they think drawings ought to look like based on drawings other people make and assumptions about what drawings ought to represent.

If you believe that drawings ought to be photorealistic, then you might be out of luck unless you’re willing to devote a lot of time to developing that skill. If you have a vision in your head of what you want your drawing to look like, but you can’t match it with your efforts, you’ll end up frustrated.

But if your expectation is only that you’ll create an image that reflects what is going on in your head in some way, odds are you’ll be able to achieve it. I used to help with art in elementary school, and as my children got older I saw firsthand how the joyful renderings of kindergarden turned into the fraught and competitive and frustrating efforts of fourth grade, when kids were comparing their work to each other’s and finding it lacking.

In kindergarden, you can give kids a watercolor palette, let them mix all the colors until they have an unappealing brown, and watch them apply it until they’ve got a solid mass of paint on curling paper and you’ll still have a satisfied child who self-identifies as an artist. If you accept brown blobs without judgment – if you celebrate the brown blobs – then a child is free to keep making art with the confidence that there is value in the process, not just the outcome.

There are lessons here for the writer. A fear of the blank page is not native to us. We build it up over time as we develop judgment and expectations of our own work. Much of this is necessary – without discernment we can’t hone and improve our craft. But allowing judgment to interfere with the act of creating – not editing, not cutting, not revising, but sheer thought-to-keyboard creating – is a very good way to convince ourselves that we lack the magic. And without the magic we deprive ourselves of the joy.



Exercises like free-writing and morning pages are good ways to coax the mind out of its lair, but wouldn’t it be better if we never went into the lair in the first place? We have to train ourselves to keep judgment out of that early process. Much as telling a child to color in the lines or keep the red paint away from the green paint will introduce uncertainty and self-censoring into his work, demanding polished prose of ourselves in a first draft will kill our ability to take our story in fresh and imaginative directions.

Every artist starts by making brown blobs. Love the blobs and there is no limit to what you can create.

The Way Summer Ought To Be

by Sophie

School's been out for a couple of weeks and I'm crazy thrilled to have my kids home. I'm not so thrilled about all the driving, arranging, scheduling...the sports camps, the music camps, the reading ahead for fall semester...not even about the charitable project one of the kids is doing (yeah, yeah, yeah, it builds character - um, mine. Moms ought to get the f'ing Eagle badge or whatever it is, just for getting through all the nagging and prodding and encouraging without turning to drink. It is ironic that the project involves something called a "Peace Pole"...conversations about its completion date are far from peaceful...)

When I was a kid, summer was a do-it-yourself affair. My mom didn't work, but I don't believe it ever occured to her that it was her responsibility to amuse us. The first she expected to see of us was dinner, as long as we got our chores done.

Needless to say, that led to a certain amount of creativity.


My favorite summer project was one I undertook with my brother. Mike made a brick mold out of scrap wood, and we started turning out bricks made from Missouri clay dirt. While we waited them to harden to a construction-ready consistency, we got some of the neighbor kids to help us dig a hole in the woods next to our house. If you're familiar with midwestern soil, you'll know that excavating sufficient rocks, roots, and clay and shale deposits to create a hole big enough for four kids to crouch in was a considerable effort. Our fingernails stayed black and our bare feet built up calluses that would send any self-respecting manicurist screaming. Many days later, we were ready to cover the thing with an old piece of drywall boosted from some dad's workshop. We made a bunch of Ritz-and-peanut-butter sandwiches and hunkered down there waiting for the apocalypse.

Drywall isn't really good for exterior walls, as the next storm proved. The bricks - whose possible use eluded us - melted back into mud. We found something else to do.

Fast forward to 2009. I'm knocking myself out to meet my deadlines while my kids turn to Resident Evil Five for company and wait for me to get hungry enough to take them to Subway. Meanwhile, on the other coast, the Best Niece Ever has found her way back to summer as it was meant to be, summer filled with imagination and magic and stories in her head.

Evidently she took a long look at her dad's Shamus plaque and thought to herself....well, this is what she thought up:



And her dad didn't help. He just....let it happen, like parents from the Olden Days.

Today's report from my brother is that my nephew now wants to get in on the action. "The pistol inspired him to make his own: 24 lego handguns, in various colorful colors. He then lined them up on the front windowsill and announced that he was opening his own gunshop."

Ooooh....I'm getting a little misty. Now that's what summer ought to be.

Bring On The Sparkle

by Sophie Littlefield

So it begins – eight writer friends gathered under one virtual roof, long on enthusiasm and ready to roll. Many thanks to the Jungle Red gang for getting us started with yesterday’s raffle. Congratulations to Edith Maxwell, who won her choice of BRUSH WITH DEATH or SHOOTING GALLERY by Juliet, aka Hailey Lind - and welcome to PensFatales!

Every couple of weeks we’ll toss out a topic and see what comes up for the eight of us and our guests. We’ve already discovered that our little band is full of renegades, so expect creative interpretations and occasional side trips.

For instance: we’re starting with a discussion of first lines. I love a sparkly sentence as much as the next reader, but it doesn’t need to be in the first paragraph or page or chapter of a book to stop me in my tracks. For me, the most memorable lines often seem to be found when characters are being developed and revealed.

Or maybe it’s just that, for me as a reader, character is everything. A plot’s nice, I guess, but show me the inside of someone’s soul and I’m hooked. Do it with a pretty turn of phrase and you’ve got me forever. I tend to just breeze through all the parts of the book where stuff actually happens (no, really…it’s a problem) but get to the heart of a character and I’ll wallow happily in your narrative.

Early on, when adolescence wasn’t working out very well for me, I found Flannery O’Conner, who was like boredom repellant. She could define not only a person but an entire relationship in a lean paragraph:

“She was plain, plain. The skin on her face was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion…She was pregnant and pregnant women were not his favorite kind.” (“Parker’s Back”)

Adulthood, as it turned out, was distracting on its own, but after a couple of decades of that, boredom set in again and I went looking for something new to read. At first I didn’t stray too far from my roots, wallowing in authors who seemed like they might have fed from the O’Conner trough:

“The coffin looked like a birthday cake, flocked pink. We had ordered it by phone. I knew Lyle would have ordered the cheapest for himself, so I ordered the second cheapest.” (James Galvin, THE MEADOW)

Age honed my tastes, and I found I liked my thrills more thrilling, my emotions assaulted with force rather than subtly nudged, and I steered straight into genre. Daniel Woodrell is the perfect gateway, as he himself isn’t sure if he writes literary or crime or what, but heaven help us can he write a sentence that hits you on the head:

"He's the kind of fella that if he was to make it to the top based only on his looks you'd still have to say he deserved it. Hoodoo sculptors and horny witches knitted that boy, put his bone and sinew in the most fabulous order…If your ex had his lips you'd still be married." (TOMATO RED)

Wouldn’t you have killed to write that?

Shiny Objects Everywhere

I’m the kind of writer who works in a state of eternal distraction, which can be good for the books but not so good for everything else.

There’s just so much going on in my head, and no one stepping up to take charge. Sure, I give myself stern lectures all the time – “Absolutely not one more Sweet-Tart until you pay that Visa bill” – but my willfulness is powerful, my resolve is weak, and my to-do list is a travesty.

If I had to find an analogy for my inner landscape, it might be a train yard early in the last century. The sensory details are all intense – iron and oil and coal and blood and shouting and cursing and danger and mysterious freight and the air practically crackling with the energy of potential, of unexplored possibilities. The tracks lead to hundreds of destinations, every freight container holds a story, and every railman means to wrest his piece of the dream from the crushing advance of Progress. Underneath it all festers the remains of last night’s boozing and whoring and nurtured resentments and shadowy longing and traitorous doubts.

Just try to remember to fill out a middle-school band permission slip when your head’s full of that.

You’re the mom who never knows what the score is after a couple of innings, the one whose children beg you to stop cussing and quit answering the door in your pajamas in the afternoon, the one who couldn’t tell you what the sermon was about but who’s pretty sure which parishioners are having affairs with which others because you’ve been inventing stories for them all through Mass.

I don’t recommend these mental working conditions. But when it works – bliss. Story bliss, at any rate. When your mind lacks the sort of filters that allow other people to stay on-topic and on-task, the most marvelous and unexpected things slip in the cracks. Everything’s possible, and nothing seems out of reach.

Publishing wisdom tells us that it’s important to maintain focus, to nurture and satisfy our readers’ expectations. And that’s great advice for those who can follow it. But for some of us, the most random discovery can lead to infatuation with a form or direction and nothing in the world will satisfy us until we drop everything and take it out for a spin.

That’s how I came to write in so many genres. Mystery and young adult…crime and horror and women’s fiction and romance. Short stories and leaden sagas. There are poems and journals and drawings and unsent letters littering the road behind me, and up ahead every new thing glitters and beckons so that half the time I’m convinced I should be writing a multimedia digi-novel.

That would be a terrible idea, of course. At some point even the most ungovernable among us need to buckle down and finish a task or two. Get the kids to school on time, the trash to the curb, the revisions turned in by deadline.

I just have to hope there aren’t too many shiny objects between point A and point B.