Happy B-day, Alfred!

Fellow author Amanda Stevens (love her suspense!) alerted me to the fact that today would have been Alfred Hitchcock's 110th birthday. In an ubercool non-marketing marketing move, Freixenet Champagne had Martin Scorsese produce this amazing short, Hitchcock-style. I absolutely loved it, but couldn't embed it here with good quality. To watch this short film (maybe about 8 minutes), follow the link. And be sure and stay tuned for the ending. Beautifully done... and pretty funny, too.

And in honor of the day, I give you one of my favorite Hitchcock quotes:

“Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.”

Pictured, favorite Hitchcock blonde, Tippi Hedren, from The Birds.

Never underestimate the power (Obama awards Ambassador Nancy Brinker the Medal of Freedom)

Couldn't be more thrilled to see Ambassador Nancy Goodman Brinker receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom today. As founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, Nancy was instrumental in bringing about a dramatic cultural, political, and scientific shift in the way breast cancer is perceived and treated, and the ripple effects from that have had an immeasurable impact on women's health care in America and around the world.

When Nancy's big sister Suzy was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1980, there were no support groups, pink ribbon races, or 800 numbers. Media refused to print the words "breast cancer." Treatment protocols were limited and brutal. Funding and awareness efforts were tepid. Before Suzy died, Nancy promised to change all that, and over the next twenty-five years, she built one of the world’s leading grassroots organizations.

Nancy pioneered the cause-marketing model that has become the gold standard for charitable fundraising, and awarded over a billion dollars in research grants. Race for the Cure events are staged around the world, raising awareness and pumping funding into local cancer resources.

As US Ambassador to Hungary, White House Chief of Protocol during the Bush administration, and now United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, she took her cause global. And she's just getting started.

From the White House blog:

The President praised the [Medal of Freedom] recipients for breaking down barriers and lifting up their fellow citizens: "These outstanding men and women represent an incredible diversity of backgrounds. Their tremendous accomplishments span fields from science to sports, from fine arts to foreign affairs. Yet they share one overarching trait: Each has been an agent of change. Each saw an imperfect world and set about improving it, often overcoming great obstacles along the way."

Congratulations, Nancy!

I've never met a more dynamic, committed, and visionary person. I'm delighted to be serving as Nancy's book sherpa on her forthcoming memoir, coming from Broadway in October of 2010. It's an amazing story.

(Scroll down and look left to pink your Twitter avatar with a Susan G. Komen for the Cure "Twibbon.")

In Praise of Slow Cooking

At times, there can be a lot of pressure to write novels quickly. Self-imposed pressure, for the most part, when authors, most of whom are in reality hyper-competitive little Hermione Granger Type A's, take a look around and see so many others zipping out three, four or even five or more books a year. Often, that's compounded by a look at our banks statements to create a lot of stress and such the joy from writing.

I have nothing but respect for authors who naturally produce a great volume of great work. From Louis L'Amour to Nora Roberts, there are a rare few who make it look easy and do it oh-so-well. What I'm trying to back away from is the idea that I need to compete on that particular field of battle, that pushing myself to blaze through projects ever-more-speedily is a bright idea. Because sometimes, it's slow cooking that brings out the richest flavors.

I'm not advocating taking three or six or more years on a project or blowing off your deadlines. In my case, I've found I can't sustain the story's momentum if I don't work every, or very nearly every, day, and my slow but steady approach covers a lot of ground. But the time spent walking in a character's footsteps, absorbing the world where she lives, and comprehending the complexities of her life add something irreplaceable to a novel, something that the reader can stop and savor on the page.

It enriches my life, too, as an author. Because when it really comes down to it, do I want to spend most of my time in Deadline Hell or Writing Heaven?

So what about the rest of you? How do you find a balance between idleness and productivity, quantity and quality?

Hey! I hear exclamation points are back! (The Vegas showgirl of punctuation marks!)

Interesting article from Stuart Jeffries in Guardian on "The Joy of Exclamation Marks!":

There is a town of 1,471 happy souls in Quebec called Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!. The second "Ha!", amazingly, is part of the town's name, not my commentary on the first "Ha!". Unlike, for example, the Devon town of Westward Ho! Ho! There, the second "Ho!" is mine. Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! is the only town in the world whose name has two exclamation marks. It will remain so until Wolverhampton is renamed Wolverhampton!! to highlight its funky new Black Country vibe, which, all things considered, seems unlikely.

Jeffries goes on to chronicle the maligning of the poor exclamation point throughout the noble history of publishing, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's assertion that "an exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes."

But wait! That was then! This is now! OMG! The internet is here! And we're all free! free! free! to write like 14-yr-old chat room grrlz!

In their book Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better, David Shipley, a comment editor for the NY TImes, and Will Schwalbe, Hyperion ed-in-chief make a case for the ol' "dog's cock" -- in email, that is:

Exclamation points can instantly infuse electronic communication with human warmth...Because email is without effect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it up to where it would normally be. If you try saying "Thanks" or "Congratulations" in the flattest tone you can muster, you'll notice it sounds sarcastic. Without an exclamation point, these may read the same way on the screen.

Hooray. I mean, Hooray! (Dang, they're right about that.)

So how does this translate in book mind? For my taste, there's still never an exclamation point in narrative, and as few as possible in dialogue. The Jeffries article also quotes Fowler's Modern English Usage:

Except in poetry the exclamation mark should be used sparingly. Excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a sure sign of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.

Okay. I mean -- Okay! I get it.

Free Summer Read from Colleen

In honor of the season, I'm leading off a free summer read round robin story called CRIMSON SURF online at Romance in the Backseat. A romantic suspense short story set at my native Jersey shore, the story features Paramedic Andrea Whitaker, still devastated by her divorce from Police Chief Jake Boone in the wake of the murder that rocked Andrea's family the previous summer. But with the new beach season in full swing, a killer has returned... and this time he's targeting another lovely brunette, Andrea herself.

In the coming days, look for the next installment from Rita nominated author Joyce Lamb.

If you leave a comment on the site, I'll enter your name for a drawing to win an autographed signed book from my backlist.

I hope you'll enjoy this free special summer bonus read!

Christoph Rehage takes the longest way (and now you know what it feels like to write a memoir)

This is the blitz version of what I mean when I say a life story is told in moments...



Rehage's website seems to be kaput just now, but there was this on YouTube:

I never finished my original goal of walking to Germany. Instead, I walked for a year and roughly 4500km, passed the desert of Gobi, and then decided to stop walking for now. All of the distance from Beijing to Ürümqi has been completed solely on foot, straight good old walking. There are instances where you can see me in the video sitting on a plane or riding a boat, but those are during breaks I had to take from walking, either to sort out bureaucracy issues or to take care of some personal things.

I had been planning this trip for over a year before I even started, and getting as far as I got was an experience for which I am very grateful. Obtaining the necessary visa for a trip like this was not very easy, hence I had to go back to Beijing a few times to resolve some issues.

The songs I used in the video are 1) Zhu Fengbo - "Olive Tree" and 2) The Kingpins - "L'aventurier" - visit the Kingpins website if you want to know more, they are very cool I think.

This is not a strict "1 pic a day" video, because I wanted to make it a bit more alive by adding some additional movement. Sometimes during the film you would follow me turn around, or something would happen in the background. I tried to capture these moments to make the video more interesting.

Weekly Quote: Thompson on Coming to Grips

Ah, so this is it. The real reason so many of us write...

"One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having to come to grips with it. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it. So I use writing as a learning tool."
- Hunter S. Thompson

"It seemed a romantic business..." (F. Scott Fitzgerald on the rise and fall of a "literary man")

In 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this in The Crack Up, a self-searching three-part series for Esquire.

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation -- the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible,” come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man -- you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived; you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Of course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied -- but I, for one, would not have chosen any other.

Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to “succeed” -- and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills -- domestic, professional, and personal -- then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.

For seventeen years, with a year of deliberate loafing and resting out in the center -- things went on like that, with a new chore only a nice prospect for the next day. I was living hard, too, but: “Up to forty-nine it’ll be all right,” I said. “I can count on that. For a man who’s lived as I have, that’s all you could ask.”

And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized I had prematurely cracked.

Read the rest here. And then get back to work.

Consider Your Deadline Merely a Suggestion? Consider This...

According to the Leon Newfakn's New York Observer article yesterday, publishers are more frequently demanding the return of advances on late books. In some cases, it's because the book is really late. (We're talkin' years, folks, in some cases.) In other cases, maybe the publisher's overextended and simply trying to cut its losses on a book they suspect won't be a money-maker. (Boo! Hiss! Let 'em do a P&L - profit and loss statement - up front and take their chances, just as we are.)

To keep in the clear, be prompt whenever possible. If you see you're not going to be able to deliver on time, for heaven's sake, chat with your editor about this. Generally, there's a bit of wiggle room to play with. But two years (surprise!) doesn't cut it.

Any thoughts on this development?

A Rant on a Review

I was thrilled to see this weekend that the Houston Chronicle book section chose to run Maureen Corrigan's Washington Post review of Nora Roberts' new romantic suspense novel, Black Hills. I'm a big fan of Roberts' hardcover romantic suspense, especially past winners such as Montana Sky, Angels Fall, and Northern Lights along with the futuristic police procedurals she writes as J.D. Robb. That's not to say I love all of Roberts books; I haven't, so I was eager to read the reviewer's opinion on this outing.

And more than that, I was thrilled to see a romantic suspense novel (the genre I write) seriously reviewed. Though newspapers occasionally deign to offer print space to reviews of mystery/suspense/thrillers, the other genres are treated like publishing's red-headed stepchildren... embarrassments that must be kept locked in the basement so they won't rot readers' brains.

My celebration didn't last long. Corrigan not only didn't like the book -- which is her perfect right -- her disdain for the entire genre came through at every turn. Phrases such as "smooch-and-shoot saga," "tussling in the sack again," and the offensively-outdated "this latest bodice-ripper" tell me this reviewer set out with a bias, with her hypersensitive Bowdler-calibrated radar quivering for the slightest hint of (insert gasp here) S-E-X.

Funny, how love scenes (which are often present) rarely come up in reviews of books by male authors writing thrillers, mystery, or horror. Funny, how in reviews of female-written, female-targeted romance, that's just about the only thing the critics ever notice.

Though Publisher's Weekly and other reviewers have praised Black Hills, I have no problem at all with the fact that Maureen Corrigan didn't. What chapped my hide was the condescending language and the implication that female fantasy is somehow inferior to male.

The Universe is Calling (Are you screening or picking up?)

An extraordinary thing happened to my mom on Friday, and it got me thinking about the tides and eddies of the universe.

It started as an ordinary annoyance: the phone and internet were on the fritz all day. Late in the afternoon, the service was back, but Mom and Dad realized they were inexplicably getting someone else's phone calls and this other party was getting theirs. The other party involved called and asked Mom to please make sure anyone who called was given the bollixed number.

Mom, being the Universal Mother Soul that she is, sensed this woman was upset over more than phone trouble.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

The woman was not all right. Her son, a young man in his 20s, had been diagnosed with lymphoma that afternoon and would be starting chemo this week. He has a 4-yr-old daughter, the woman said, and they didn't know what to tell her.

"My daughter was diagnosed with lymphoma when her daughter was five," said Mom. "She's still alive. She's doing fine. And her little girl is 20 now."

I hate that my mom had to live through this world-wrecking experience with me, but I'm so grateful she was there for this woman in that moment. Mom stayed on the phone with her for over an hour, listening with informed compassion, sharing hard-earned practical knowledge and mom-of-the-cancer-person coping mechanisms. When you're suddenly adrift in that storm, a lighthouse means everything, and my mom is so good at that, shining a steady beam of faith from a rock solid foundation of common sense.

Astonishingly, when Mom told this woman I'd written a book about my chemo experience and mentioned my name, the woman actually recognized me from my radio show twenty years ago. They'd apparently listened to me every afternoon in her office, where she'd worked with my brother, Bruce, who died in 1999.

By the time these two mother-soul-sisters tearfully hung up their mutually discombobulated phones, Mom says, "We had to believe that God was very much in charge of crossing the phone lines."

Moments later, Qwest called to say they'd uncrossed the lines and Mom's phone was working fine.

"Do you believe in God or coincidence?" I asked Gary after I read him my mother's email.

"I believe in ball-bearings," he huffed.

"Oh, come on!" I said. "At the very least, that deserves a resounding What are the odds?"

"That had to be Uncle Bruce," said my grown up little girl, Jerusha. "He was a techie." (And ever shall be.)

I'm a big ol' hippie, I know, but in my heart, I believe in God as the continuum of love that connects everything and everyone. Together we are the Universe. And Universal Love is the heart of God. Anecdotal evidence is all around us: we are the answer to each other's prayers. We keep looking for a bolt from above, but God has already given us to each other as a gift.

The thing is, this sort of extraordinary happening is actually not out of the ordinary at all for my mother -- or for me, in fact. I'm constantly amazed at all the little ties that bind. But that's because I'm my mother's daughter. When I was a teenager, I genuinely thought she was psychic, but the kitchen table reality is that she generates these serendipitous encounters by being the kind of woman who says "Are you all right?" instead of ignoring the pain in the voice of a stranger. She experiences extraordinary connections with people because the door to her heart is always open. The Universe speaks to her no more often than it does to anyone else; the difference is, she's listening.

I could get lost in thoughts about what it would mean to art, relationships, politics, and publishing if we could all keep that line open, but I want to end here with a few words on the ball bearings of the situation. Having cancer as a 20-something seriously sucks, and I've recently learned of a couple terrific resources I wish had been around when I was diagnosed:

Everything Changes: The Insider's Guide to Cancer in Your 20's and 30's by Kairol Rosenthal
From Publishers Weekly:

After being diagnosed with thyroid cancer at the age of 27, Rosenthal, a choreographer and now a patient advocate for young adults with cancer, crisscrossed the country, interviewing other young cancer victims. Rosenthals text is part guidebook, part true confessions (including her own), as she segues between intimate conversations and sound advice on topics ranging from dating and parenting to working the health-care system and coping with pain. The interviews are riveting...the work as a whole is poignant, raw and informative.

Visit Kairol's "Everything Changes" blog for book tour info and continuing insights. (Note to PW: We are not "victims"; we are "survivors" for whatever the number of hours, days, or years we are alive to give interviews.)

Plus peace, love and grooviness to all.

PS ~ If you'd like to read a meticulously researched book on a fascinating bit of American history, check out my mom's book, Fifty Cents An Hour: The Builders and Boomtowns of the Fort Peck Dam.

You'll Laugh, You'll Wince... You Might Even Recognize Yourself Here

I was bopping around the web checking out Dorchester Editor Leah Hultenschmidt's Romantic Reads blog when I came across this book teaser video for Bill Folman's political satire, The Scandal Plan. I probably would've passed on a ten-minute teaser, but Leah said it was hilarious, so I clicked... and laughed my head off.

If you've ever poured your heart and soul into a book, then wondered what the heck you'd have to do to make anyone -- anyone at all -- pay one lick of attention, you've gotta see this send-up of Folman's efforts to get folks to give his book a whirl.

Trust me on this one. Check it out - and Bill Folman's website, too. If he's this funny in film, the novel sounds like a great bet.

How to Blow It

Thanks to YA author Tera Lynn Childs for her Twitter posts on reasons for instant rejection by agents Jessica Faust of BookEnds and Janet Reid.

Both ladies are spot on. When I meet someone who claims to want to be a novelist, I know I'm in the presence of a light-weight never-will-be when the following credibility bombs drop from their mouths. My curmudgeonly, uncharitable thoughts are included for your edification - and you can bet most agents and edits out there, who are approached so much more often - feel about the same.

1. I just don't really have the time to write, you know?
(Nobody's given extra hours for writing. We just make it a priority, you know?)

2. I have this great idea for a book. You want to work on it together? You do the writing and use your contacts -- I'll share the profits 50-50.
(Excuse me, I'm running late for an appointment.)

3. I have this great idea for a book. It's going to be a huuuuge bestseller.
(Great writers prove their greatness. With their published work.)

4. Favorite authors? I don't really read much.
(Bwahaha! If you don't really, really love books and reading, your dream's toast. No exceptions.)

5. Besides, everything out there is such crap.
(Not everything published is great. But people who slam everything aren't paying attention. Plus they come off sounding like sour-grape, egotistical know-nothings.)

6. My book's just like (insert title of humongous bestseller). Only it's well-written.
(Uh, no, I wasn't rolling my eyes. There was just something stuck in them. Scout's honor.)

7. My sister/mother/husband/best friend says it's great, so would you mind taking a look and recommending me to your agent? (No. I have only a precious few credibility cards to play with my agent, and I'm not wasting one on some stranger who doesn't know enough to get an unbiased opinion.)

8. Someone helped you out, right? So don't you think you ought to give me a break and hook me up with your editor? (Your obnoxiousness is tempting me to give you the kind of break that involves emergency rooms, itchy casts, and pesky assault charges. I don't know you and don't owe you, and you're coming off as stalkerish.)

9. Do you think you could read my manuscript and give me some pointers? (This really isn't such a loser thing to ask, but I have very limited time for critiquing unpublished work, and it's pretty much all taken up with reading the manuscripts of critique partners with whom I've established long relationships and great trust. Besides that, like most authors, I've been burned, hurt badly by people who not only didn't appreciate my two cents but have accused me of trying to sabotage them, being jealous, or wanting to steal from their ideas. In our litigious society, I can't afford to take the chance on getting my arse sued off for doing a near-stranger a huge favor. Sorry.)


10. Well, anybody can get published if they're only writing romance. What I write's much more challenging. Way more selective, you know?
(Must. Leave. Now. Before violence ensues.)