How to Handle a Hit-and-Run as an Amateur Detective

Someone has hit your car. There it was, the yellow plastic from the other person's taillight housing, the fragment of yellow plastic embedded into the bumper from his/her apparently severe velocity, and a witness -Nick, the mail guy, who said that when the car was "tagged," the whole thing rocked. What happened to the perpetrator? He/she vanished -no note, no admission, not even a suspect in a somewhat vacant lot.

Did I mention that you signed up for Introduction to Forensics on Coursera this week?



Even though your most secret dreams involve becoming Sherlock Holmes's best Watson, you hate to admit that you're a little excited. Does this make you certifiable, you wonder, the enjoyment that comes from your car having just been hit, this thrill of a case to be solved?

You decide to:
a) Check your taillight housings.
b) Pick up the fragments of the perpetrator's taillights and keep them for investigation.
c) Assess the damage, including approximate size of vehicle, color, velocity, and clues from the fragments.
d) Call the college Campus Police.

Answer:
Everything but d. After all, why should you call Campus Police when you want to solve the mystery yourself?



You finally call Campus Police the day after the event only after you've written a short story about a somewhat psychopathic college instructor sitting on the hood of the car of the perpetrator. (True story.) The officer on duty recommends stopping by the next time you're in town, which ends up being Saturday morning. You take Officer Loyd out to your car in the parking lot and you show her the damage.

Do you:
a) Tell her about the plastic from the perpetrator's taillight that you kept, but not show it to her?
b) Tell her about the plastic from the perpetrator's taillight, and then show them to her for photographing?
c) Keep the taillight fragments secret from her so that you can continue your own investigation.

Answer:
Though c is tempting, you go with b.



Officer Loyd doesn't seem to think there's much of a report to make (she doesn't say so but she doesn't object when you verbalize it). You want to prove that you're not just a fuddy-duddy adjunct instructor but instead someone with crime-solving superpowers, so you tell her about the size of the vehicle in proximity to the ground, the approximate velocity of the vehicle for the plastic to be embedded into the fender, and when she wonders about the color of the other vehicle, you say, "Well, it could be a black vehicle considering that the speed of the collision would have rendered paint transfer." You hold out the plastic fragments (thankfully allowed to remain in your possession), "And the smoothness of the taillights indicates that this was a somewhat new vehicle because the plastic doesn't indicate much outdoor weathering."

She looks at you with somewhat amazement. "Wow. Were you a cop before?"

You blush. "No, I just watch too much Sherlock Holmes."

Now you're both embarrassed.



When you get somewhere with the case, your story will continue. In the meantime, you can just take comfort knowing that you're a mystery novelist that has just been confused as a cop.

Banagrams Revision

You know how sometimes when you're playing Bananagrams, there's only three tiles left that don't fit in anywhere, the clock is ticking, your competition is getting closer to figuring out his/her own crossword, and you make that brave choice -you know, the one where you choose to dismantle a few words so that you can make new words out of them?

I hate that feeling.

It does have its purpose: I've won games that way. But the risk of dismantling words makes your skin crawl as those seconds tick by, as your opponent's eyes flit from one word to the next, and you ask yourself, "Is this really worth it?"

Welcome, my friends, to the feeling of revision.

I'm currently revising a part of my novel for the Amtrak Residency. It's a perfectly okay scene where Constantine walks to Denny's after finding a dead girl by the dumpster at the Outback in the middle of the day. After he gets to Denny's, he meets Kimy, who will be come -as she says- "the Sherlock to his Watson."

But I don't want a scene that's just okay. Publishers don't publish okay. Readers don't do okay. So here I am dismantling paragraphs that I liked, paragraphs that were amusing and now are falling "to the cutting room floor," as it were.

 Kill your darlings.

Mars, My Muse

Is it weird that I watch something contemporary and think, "This could make for an excellent noir mystery."

Case in point, Veronica Mars. I had started watching it with a friend after a conversation about mysteries and strong female detectives, and then -just as several viewers, I've learned- I became hooked. I love TV series' that use the story arc of the season to solve a mystery. It transcends a show from mundane sit-com-edy and is a little easier to believe than my beloved Miss Marple who -let's face it- must be killing the victims in these big houses because no one just happens to stumble upon murders this often -even if you are on a first name basis with the constabulary.

Taking aside for a second the Mars Detective Agency has a Raymond Chandler feel to it, I've been even more enthused with the idea of amateur detective going into places that no one would expect her to, and I love the idea that she isn't an Ice Queen (all the time, at least). And let's face it: who wouldn't want to be the quick-witted-and-occasionally-snarky girl who always has the perfect comeback?

Today is a special day: Veronica Mars is back after (as Logan put it) "nine years of radio silence." After nine years, the movie is out, it was privately funded through Kickstarter (every artist's dream), and my friend and I are off to an AMC theater to go see it. See it, my friends, and you'll see a timeless character that transcends her surroundings -a muse-worthy character, indeed.

Setting Goals, For Realsies

Do you remember human development classes in middle school? It was in that class that my frizzy-haired teacher passed around half-sheet-sized card stock paper emblazoned in Comic Sans: My Goals. When no one was quick to write any goals down (because, yes, we were in middle school), she gave us a statistic about how middle schoolers with goals were far more likely to graduate high school and not do drugs. Maybe none of us intended on (in my case) reading every Nancy Drew book that had ever been written, or intended on (in their case) skateboarding in every public park in Phoenix, but we rushed to write stuff down because we didn’t want to be seen as ne'er-do-wells (not that we would have known that word). 

Not much has changed. Aside from the fact that I graduated high school and read every Nancy Drew book up until number 40, it has become increasingly clear in the last few years that you need to have writing goals. Your frizzy-haired human development teacher isn’t going to give you half of a page of card stock, and she’s not going to call you a drug dealer if you don’t fill it out (I hyperbolize, but I seem to remember a joke like that).

A writer needs goals, and it can’t be something like, “Finish novel someday.” You need to constantly work toward putting yourself out there, constantly work with at least one project, and constantly have a goal in mind for that project. Again, this goal doesn’t count: “Publish with a big publisher and make it big with little to no effort so that I can make money like James Patterson and hog as much space on a bookshelf as possible, and also possibly afford a vacation in the Bahamas with my tanned girlfriend who only wears Gucci sunglasses that I buy her.” Okay, that may not exactly be your goal, but if we’re being honest, here, you would love it if that happened, and you would love it if you didn’t have to do much work for that to happen. Can I just say now that while dreams are important, unrealistic dreams are crippling?

At the risk of using a cliché, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. (Except I would never eat an elephant, but that’s not here nor there.) Start small, work big.

So in the vein of good intentions, here are my goals:

1.     Finish editing last scene of dialogue. Send finished draft out to publisher I met at AWP.

2.     Finish 3^rd prose poem. Send collection of 3 prose poems to different publisher I met at AWP.

3.     Write short piece on writing. Send to yet another publisher I met at AWP.

4.     Long term goal: Finish novel by the middle of the summer.

5.     Reading goal: Read at least one Agatha Christie for plotting, and read at least one John Green for voice.

Make some goals, my friends -and not goals that just involve you rolling in the dough.   

How a Platform Works for Writers

How a Platform Works for Writers

We’ve all pictured it: writers sitting reclusively in a cabin in the woods, sometimes handwriting a novel (yeah, right), sometimes using a typewriter (okay, it’s been a while), or sometimes using a Macbook Pro (that’s more like it). Outside of any sexism, we often picture this writer as a man with a beard and in his pajamas because we romanticize the notion of a writer who has been in seclusion for so long that it’s okay to lose a few social norms, and he’s writing in such a fury that he’s even absconded basic hygiene. Even cynic writers embrace this image because all writers –all of us- love this idea that the novel is so intense and so important that we must get it out, must get it on paper or typed before the idea fades, before the potential for the Pulitzer or the Nobel Prize for Literature gets lost into the folds of our gray matter, only later to come back as vaguely as a wisp of smoke. We love the idea that a human –bearded male or not- can be rewarded for sacrificing relationships and “real work” to the idea that he or she can write something beautiful and amazing, that this person can get a hefty advance, a spot on the New York Times Bestseller list, a promotion from Oprah, and a gaggle of awards –and then recede back to the cabin in the woods to do it all over again.

But these days are gone.

The extinction of the reclusive writer is something that is lamented, because writing is hard. No one tells you that when you see images of a writer sitting down and typing out “It was a dark and stormy night…” No one tells you that it doesn’t just flow from you, that it’s like a long-term relationship that you need to work at and commit to, even when it’s not interesting anymore. No one tells you that writing your novel has to happen around life –around potty training, writing assignments for school, and around the pressured, unrealistic deadlines your boss gives you. Every writer wants to be the reclusive writer because that means that you can shut out the rest of the frustrating world to do the thing that you want to do. That is a dream, my friends.

Some writers blame technology for the death of the reclusive writer. After all, because of technology, the publishing world demands more now of a group of people who would rather be left alone, thankyouverymuch. But let’s look for a second about how the market is changing: readers are busier than ever. Why do you think eBooks available on smart phones and iPads have done so well? Readers are busy people, people who –if they read at all- need to get their hands on a book fast.  There are fewer and fewer bookstores and libraries, and there are more and more technology-savvy readers who will read whatever they can get their hands on –and sometimes that isn’t just the book. Readers –just like many users in several categories- demand information immediately, which could mean lower-quality books being written faster (rare) or permission for the writer to take longer writing higher-quality books as long as the reader can indulge themselves with other information about that writer –often that writer’s life.  

You might ask how this affects the writer. Well, with the book world changing, publishers are far more selective about who they pick up as new talent and who they keep as old talent. They want their writers to have something called a “platform.” For established writers like James Patterson, a platform is Facebook, Twitter, a website, and a blog (though we’ll discuss other technological platforms here in just a minute). A platform for a big writer like James Patterson is important to keep the readers engaged between books. But that’s not all a platform is essential for: it is life-giving for the new novelist.

A new writer cannot be picked up without a technological platform. A platform is an online presence that not only engages readers, but it’s also something that the publishing houses see as (near) guaranteed buyers. For example, if you have 300 friends on Facebook, the publisher sees this as okay, but not great, because that’s only 300 books sold. It might sound like a lot, but publishers would really like to sell tens of thousands of copies of a book title, and if only your friends on Facebook buy that title (and, of course, you know that you’re not going to get all 300 to buy your book), it’s just not enough. It might be nice that a big writer like James Patterson has a Facebook, a Twitter, a blog, and a website, but the new writer must have these. Say you have 300 friends on Facebook, you have 500 followers on Twitter, you have 50 readers a week on your blog, and you have 10 readers a week on your website. That’s nearly a thousand people a week that you have potential access to –and nearly a thousand looks much better than merely 300 first time buyers.

Whether you’re a new writer or just new to the technology game, you’ll find that a blog, a website, Facebook, and Twitter are excellent engagers –and you can even throw in Instagram and Tumblr. Your readers, now, feel somehow connected to your life. You might be posting an Instagram photo of you writing at a coffee shop, share it on your Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and you followers will get excited. In the Information Age, your readers don’t want a prickly, reclusive writer that doesn’t connect to his or her audience: a reader wants to feel like a follower, to feel like a supporter, to feel important to a writer’s career. What many writers of today don’t realize is that those supporters really are essential to his or her career –in fact, the fate of your novel could depend on something as seemingly unrelated as how many people “like” your Facebook page.

If you're compelled to help a girl out, be sure to like my Facebook page: there's a link to it on the sidebar :) 

How to Write When the Bullets Are Flying

I used to say that you should never write at home. After all, you're surrounded by all of these things you like, because -after all- you chose to put them in your house.

And then I used to say that you should never write in a coffee shop because you're constantly around distractions. There's people coming in, people going out, and there are people who escalate in rudeness -I mean, volume. You have the pounding of the espresso being cleaned out, the hiss of the machine, the rattling of the blender, and this is all of the noise on top of the din of whatever music the barista selected.

Now I'm back to writing at home. Both places are equally distracting, but at least I don't have to spend money at home. (And now I have the pug puppy so I would rather be home to keep her company and take her outside when she needs to.) When Jonathan Franzen published to much critical acclaim Freedom, I remember he was featured in Time magazine. More memorable than popular adages that writers throw out or advice on how to tackle a long-term project, I remember him sharing with America what his writing room looked like. I was shocked at how sterile it was. Take a look.

I mean, finding time to write and overcoming distractions might be hard, but it's not insurmountable... Or is it?

An avid reader of Writer's Digest, I read an article a few years ago from a freelance writer. I hadn't yet embarked on that adventure myself, but I attended a workshop during residency at Goddard College on how to be a freelance writer, and I was intrigued to learn as much about it as possible. The writer of this article (his name escapes me now that I've had a few thousand names circulate since then) offered memorable advice: "If you're going to be successful, you need to learn to write when the bullets are flying."

Okay, how many of us require absolute silence when you're writing? Yeah, that was me, too. I couldn't picture what writing while the bullets were flying looked like.

This writer continued: he said that he was a stay-at-home dad who was a freelance writer, and if he wanted a paycheck that week, he had to figure out how to write articles around let's go to the potty, around tantrums, around fights, around getting dinner ready, and around welcoming mommy home from work. I have new respect for you, you parents who juggle writing and/or grad school, novel writing, and freelance writing: my puppy is now seven months old and while she tries my patience while writing (sometimes with gregarious efforts to get my attention), she's still just a dog, and not a gaggle of mini-me's who pull on each others' hair, throw tantrums, and destroy the bathroom.

So how do you do it?

Every writer has distractions, whether they're children, puppies, or (if we're being honest) Netflix. Distractions are a natural part of life (especially now that technology is so pervasive in our culture), and you as a writer need to find a way to overcome that.

Here's your challenge, writers: learn to write while the bullets are flying. Find a way that works for you. Here are some tips that I've found some help from:


1. Start the day with writing. You may or may not have plans for how the day is going to go, but I promise you it'll fill up nonetheless. Start the day off by writing so that even if you do get sidelined by your distractions plans, you'll have something done.

2. Make sure your friends and family know your priorities. Probably the hardest thing for a writer to say to friends and family is, "I can't because I have a lot of writing to do." Sometimes because people think you're a writer, they think that all you do is sit around in your pajamas all day, or that when you sit down to write, it comes pouring out of you. Treat your writing (whether creative or freelance) like you're clocking in to a brick-and-mortar store: your boss in retail doesn't want to you take a bunch of breaks and to be late coming back from lunch, right? So your freelance boss doesn't want you to, either. And your fiction boss (you), will be happier when you meet your goals. Writer's shouldn't be loners who live in the woods and only come into town once a month for supplies, but you should make sure that your work time balances out your play time.

3. Reward yourself. When you're putting off your friends until tomorrow and you're kicking butt on these deadlines regarding things you've written that you're not remotely interested in (yeah, true fact: to be paid for your pen, you often have to write about stuff that is mind-numbingly disinteresting), you need to reward yourself. Watch an extra episode of your favorite show, or take an extra long time to make dinner. You worked hard: you deserve it.

Check It Out!

I'm being published again :)

If you've been following me for a while, you know that I love Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores by Jen Campbell. Coming from someone who used to work in a bookstore, it brings back some great memories. Okay, some not-so-great memories, too, but there are some really funny, weird things that happen in bookstores that you never anticipate when you submit your resume. If you want to take a look at some of those funny stories, check them out here and here.

After I read the immensely fun book (several times, in fact), I emailed Jen Campbell to tell her how much I loved it and I started following her on Facebook. When in the last year she asked for some contributions regarding bookstores, I thought, "Why not?"

When Prescott, AZ, lost our Barnes&Noble, we got an indie bookstore called Peregrine Book Company. While I could have written about plenty of lovely bookstores I've been to -Powell's Books in Portland, Insatiables in Port Townsend, Vroman's in Pasadena, Bookman's all over Arizona, or Changing Hands in Tempe- I thought that it would be an interesting angle to discuss the transition from one store to another store, especially when it was a transition from a corporate store to an indie store.

The book my piece is featured in is called The Bookshop Book by Jen Campbell and is expected to be out in October in the UK. Check it out!