Fear Factor: Four Ways to Scare Them!

A post for Halloween Eve. How could I not discuss what scares us? Thinking about scary scenes from books and movies, brought back a vivid memory of a movie my cousins introduced me to when I was eleven. “The Beast with Five fingers” was made in 1947 and it was the last movie Peter Lorrie ever made with Warner Borthers. A famous pianist dies, his hand is severed and the hand commits murders. When the hand is thrown into a fire, it manages to crawl out and still strangle its victim!  And at the sound of piano music, the audience knows the hand is on its way to the next victim.  For months after seeing that movie, I made sure my covers didn’t touch the floor. I knew the hand could climb, but I was pretty sure it couldn’t jump. What scared me was the most was the possibility of what that hand could do. 

While I don’t write horror, I do have scenes that I create to scare my readers, so I’ve spent some time analyzing what makes a scary scene work.  

Build dread through details:

A scene that terrified me as a young reader was in The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. She builds an atmosphere of dread word by word. On mid winter eve Will Stanton is alone in his room. He lies awake in the dark listening to every sound, recalling the strange events of the day, certain he is going mad. Up to this point, she’s seeded the story with foreshadowing...The walker is abroad..this night will be bad…. Her description of the moaning wind, the strange behavior of animals, the palpable presence of the dark increases our tension. We don’t know what will happen in that room but when the snow crashes through the skylight and a single rook feather lands on the bed, we are as startled and horrified as Will. 

Master of horror, Stephen Kings says:

“Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything. Or a broken billboard. Or weeds growing in the cracks of a library’s steps. Of course, none of this means a lot without characters the reader cares about (and sometimes characters—‘bad guys’—the reader is rooting against).” 

Focus on character response:

Cooper builds dread not only through the details, but in Will’s response to them. If Will’s response isn’t real fear, ours won’t be either. Our heart rate escalates, our palms grow sweaty along with the protagonist if the author shows us what the character is risking. The reader’s response is in proportion to the protagonist’s. Which leads me to…

Make it worth the sweat

The dark  must be worth fearing. Readers gauge their fear by understanding consequences. If the antagonist isn’t a credible baddie, if the reader doesn’t understand the potential of the night in the woods, the severed hand, the discarded revolver, the scene loses power. Think about Hannibal Lecter who “once ate a census taker's liver ‘with fava beans and a nice Chianti.’”

Leave it to the imagination:

What scares us most is in our own imaginations, the possibility rather than the actual. The unknown is scarier and more enticing than the known. The skillful writer will already have cranked the tension up with foreshadowing. Fear comes from the tension of not knowing the outcome, but expecting the worse. Perhaps the protagonist is about to do something stupid: go into the cellar, spend the night in a haunted house. Readers know bad things are coming, but we don’t know how those bad things will play out. Our own minds can be scarier than a graveyard on Halloween night. It’s the author’s job to lead us there and then blow out the candle.

 

What’s your favorite scary scene from a book or movie?

Cthulhu: Horrible or Huggable?

Ever hear of a writer by the name of H. P. Lovecraft?

Even if you haven’t, I bet you’ve heard of Stephen King, who called Lovecraft “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale,” and cited Lovecraft’s work as his own greatest inspiration for horror fiction. There is no better blurb in the world.

Lovecraft created a whole mythology of strange and alien creatures that has never truly been matched since his death almost 80 years ago. His most famous short story, The Call of Cthulhu, is a great representation of this as it presents us with a cosmic evil so far beyond our mortal understanding that his mere existence is enough to drive men mad.

Just take a look at this guy’s ugly mug and tell me you wouldn’t lose your marbles if he came to you in a dreams:

Cthulhu is only one of Lovecraft’s many bizarre and haunting creatures, and his images of groping tentacles and internal corruption have inspired countless movies, books, and games. In fact, because Lovecraft died without heirs, his writings and his mythos are public domain, making them free to read, adapt, and update.

In fact, there is a whole cottage industry built around bringing Lovecraft’s works to life in the 21^st century. Anybody who knows Lovecraft can see his ideas popping up in some of the greatest horror films of all time, like the Necronomicon in The Evil Dead and the shape-changing alien in The Thing.

The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society has also directly adapted some of his best stories into very compelling movies that mimic the silent films of Lovecraft’s era. In fact, there’s even an annual H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in two cities.

There’s another side of the Lovecraft fan world, though. Here, Lovecraft’s beasties are treasured as funny and cute. In fact, the more nightmarish the original, the more people want a cute-ified version. Take this little plush Cthulhu, for example:

I’ve seen Cthulhu bobble-heads, funny shoggoths and fish-men t-shirts, and even a plush Necronomicon complete with fuzzy teeth (presumably to consume the fuzzy souls of any teddy bear who reads it). One of my favorite spoofs is a set of mythos holiday songs such as “Death to the World” (sung to the tune of “Joy to the World”) and “Harley Got Devoured by the Undead” (to the tune of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”)

And then, of course, there’s my SUPER soft and fuzzy Cthulhu pillow, whom my cat loves to snuggle with:

My question is whether these two approaches can exist together. Can Cthulhu be both horrible and huggable at the same time?

Personally, I like both versions, but I have a friend who hates the cute stuff. He says it undermines the intended experience and draws the life out of one of the most interesting mythologies of the modern world.

Maybe he’s taking this whole thing too seriously. Or, maybe my laughter at “Cute-thulhu” is really just a psychological defense against the horror.

Even if you’ve never heard of Lovecraft before now, I wonder if you, gentle reader, have ever had an experience where you enjoyed a cute spoof of something harsh?

Or, have you had the opposite experience, where the seriousness of a book or movie was undermined by a funny parody?

In short: how do you Cthulhu?

The Absolute Truth about My Muse—as Far as You Know

by Jordan Dane
@JordanDane

Every time someone asks me about my muse, I lie. (If you write fiction for a living, is it really lying?) I tell some people it is my two rescue dogs Taco and Sancho or I blame my weirdness on my peculiar rescue cats. There are days these aren’t lies exactly, but they’re not entirely the truth. Today I’m finally coming out with the truth, as best I can figure this out. My muse is a seven headed hydra with a flying horse body. There, I said it. And it looks something like this.

 

 

 

The flying horse comes from my love of anything HORSE. That love turned me onto reading as a kid in elementary school. I read every book in my school library that had a horse in it. I love westerns, but my favorite horse book was a fantasy with a flying one. I actually worked to buy my first horse and ended up with my family owning several. Noble creatures.

The first good-looking hunk (head) on the left is actor Eric Etebari who played the dark assassin, Ian Nottingham, in the short run TV show on TNT, Witchblade. I became so enthralled with his character of a noble assassin that I wrote fanfiction on the show for six months. When the show got cancelled, I could have shriveled up and forgotten about my writing, but it was the best thing that could have happened to me, as I look back. I made up my mind to write original stories after that.

Next to Ian Nottingham is Zig Ziglar, motivational speaker who flipped a light bulb over my head when he said that he wrote his non-fiction book doing it a page a day. I thought, “Hell, I could do that” and made up my mind to try. Zig isn’t a motivational speaker for nothing.

Next to Zig is Robert Ludlum (RIP), the master of espionage thrillers who wrote the Jason Bourne series and many other great spy novels. He amazed me with his style and pace. Even as a reader, he struck me with his amazing talent and still does when I replenish my writer’s soul by rereading books of his from my personal library. He made me a crime fiction author for life.

The Cyclops dude represents my crazy family. It takes a village to raise a writer and I was no exception. I still call my mom everyday and read her what I write in its raw form. My siblings are all very supportive. And my husband is my number one fan, but not in a creepy way like Kathy Bates and he axe. (In the book Misery by Stephen King, she used a turkey carving knife. Read it and you will never see Thanksgiving the same way again.) My husband clears the way so I can focus on my work every day and is my brainstorming partner when I need a level head.

The Grizzly bear is my memory of Alaska where I lived for ten years. My heart is still there. Whenever I get lonely for it, I contact friends I have who still live there, but I can also write about it. My books EVIL WITHOUT A FACE and ON A DARK WING are set in Alaska.

The dangerous looking woman on the right is my love for strong empowered women in the books I write. Even when these women have incredible emotional baggage, like my bounty hunter Jessica Beckett in my Sweet Justice series, they find a way to survive and thrive. Creating the right man to deserve them is a bonus.

But perhaps the most important muse is the one who reminds me why I started writing in the first place. The central woman with a book in her hand is YOU. With every book I write, I start a circle (my journey), but that journey is only half complete. It takes a reader to take that trip with me and complete the circle. Hearing from my readers, especially in the wee hours of the morning via email, can absolutely lift me to a higher place. No lie.

So as you can see, I am surrounded by my muse every day and it’s a seven-headed winged horse Hydra. Did you really think my muse was a puppy? Pffftt. Wiggly puppy tails and the smiley faces of my rescue dogs feed another (no less important) part of my soul, but my writing muse is a beautiful magnificent beast.

What about you? Do you have a hydra of influences in your closet…maybe wearing a jet pack?

Those Boys in the Basement

Ever have those moments when you've slaved all day over a hot keyboard and gotten in all your pages and so you think, okay, I deserve a break today? (And, no, I don't mean a Big Mac and fries.)  Or let's say you've been fretting all day and you just can not, for the life of you, figure out how to tweak something to make that plot go?  In either case, you get up, walk away, head out to the gym--and then <DOH> it hits you, that Bart Simpson moment: how you're going to have to go back and tear up about five of those ten or twelve pages because you messed up.  Or that messy plot point unravels for you?  Or there's something even better you coulda/shoulda/woulda written if you've only been THINKING?  

Ah, but the trick is: you thought of it because you didn't.

In BAG OF BONES and ON WRITING, King calls it the boys in the basement.  Other people call it: muse, the subconscious, the unconscious, the artistic impulse.  Me, I call it both a Bart Simpson moment and a necessary ingredient to creativity: those instances when you have relaxed your conscious attention to a task and, Eureka, the answer--or a reasonable facsimile--presents itself.  For it to work for me, I need to be exercising or out in the garden, out in the sun, or hiking--doing something outdoors.  I have a writer-friend who routinely takes a nap if he comes up against a plot point that just won't fix itself.  Stephen King goes for long walks, and so does his protag in BAG OF BONES.

What we're all doing is diverting our attention from the task at hand.  We're removing ourselves from the surround and environmental cues that not only dictate how we should be behaving (i.e., hoeing a garden is altogether different from tapping on a keyboard and composing sentences) but create the expectations that we SHOULD both create and be creative.  That is, we're taking ourselves out from under the eye of the boss-man, who'll certainly dock our pay if we take one second's extra break than we're entitled to.

We all know the difference in these styles of thought, too, because we feel them and we feel the transitions back and forth.  (Hinky and unsettling, but true.)  Conscious thought is analytic and derivative; that is, when we're focused on a task, we think about it and make judgments.  We winnow; we parse and pare; we don't encourage the weeds.  Unconscious thought is, of course, much more closely related to dreaming, when the mind makes what feel like bizarre associations on the basis of connections we've forgotten about.  Think of the dream's imagery as the brain's attempt to find near-matches, places where your experiences should be slotted.  Those pathways are not logical; they're not derivative; they're a bit like weedy cross-connections: dandelions that worked their way into your cucumber patch because both plants have yellow flowers.

Allowing your unconscious to help you out is a bit like letting the boys in the basement play.  You need to relax enough to allow them to play, and for many of us, that means distractions: walking, napping, ripping out pesky weeds, breaking up of dirt, cooking dinner, doing the laundry; anything that allows your rigorous control over where your thoughts go to slip a bit.

But creativity is still a two-step process.  Yes, you can let the boys play.  They can come up with an interesting and novel solution.  But then you have to allow that solution to become conscious; it has to translate and transfer itself from the back of your mind to the front.  This isn't trivial either.  If you've ever tried a dream journal (I did, waaaay back when I was in analysis), you realize how stupid your dreams feel and sound and how fleeting they are once you engage a secondary, cognitive process like forming words with a pen or pencil.  What felt so logical or emotionally laden in a dream becomes, well, kind of dumb in the translation--and you also tend to forget if you can't find a way to allow the transfer to occur, and quickly.

For me, that means talking to myself, out loud, especially since I'm usually miles from home.  Yes, I get many strange looks because I have to keep talking, or my attention begins to wander again.  (This is both good and bad.  I may lose what I just discovered, but I may also gain something else.   In the middle of the night, if I jump up after a long period of staring at the ceiling and letting my attention wander, then I have a little tougher time deciphering what I meant if I've written it down.  Hearing my own voice tends to sock it home.  Even then, I still forget, which is kind of a pain.  Not to mention the fact that I'm jumping up and down all night long, and the husband is . . . well, a little annoyed.  OTOH, I have a very understanding spouse who doesn't seem to mind talking for a while in the wee hours.  He understands the value of calming the savage beast.)  I know other authors carry notebooks; some talk into digital recorders or their phones.  We all have our ways of translating that play into the work we've secretly been doing all along.

The important thing is to recognize that not paying attention allows us to solve complex problems--BUT that only works when we actually have a goal.  In other words, if you're inattentive and sort of a space cadet and have no real goal or problem or purpose . . . yeah, you're going to flounder, you're going to drift, and no Eureka moments for you.  On the other hand, if you are engaged in solving a complex problem, then not paying attention--not thinking about what's bothering you--will actually help the boys help YOU find the answer.

Now, excuse me . . . oooh, there goes a really pretty butterfly . . .

Enjoying the Ride

If you've been out of town or off-grid for the last few days, then you probably missed hearing about Neil Gaiman's commencement address to graduates of the University of the Arts.  Even if you've heard about and/or listened, it's a speech well worth listening to again.  So, go ahead; I'll wait.




Now, there's a lot in this particular speech worth focusing on, especially the stuff about making your own rules. On the other hand, I'll be honest: I did that way back. Figured out which rules I could break and the ones I had to stick to, and then acted accordingly. Would I have gotten further faster if I'd stuck to the rules back then? Again, being honest? The answer is no. I did stuff you weren't supposed to, but I'd gone by the rules for a while, gotten nowhere, and decided I couldn't be doing any worse , so . . . why not? Of course, it also might have been that what I'd actually written before wasn't what it needed to be to break in. But I don't necessarily believe that either because I'd been playing by the rules with stuff that kept being routinely rejected--but which got accepted, pretty much right away, once I decided to break the rules.

But that's not actually what I'm writing about today. Nor do I agree with every single one of Gaiman's points because, honestly, you really DO need to a) be a pro, b) be on time and c) be turning in good stuff. I don't know anyone at this stage of the game who can be an absolute schmuck and yet be so totally brilliant that everyone just puts up with it . . . but then again, I don't move in the same circles as Gaiman and King and anyone else who's a mega-bestseller.


No, the part of Gaiman's address that I breezed right past--but which was, for me, the most important part--and something I still need to focus on is that whole enjoyment thing. It's really fascinating that while I heard it, I didn't "hear" it and it took a friend to point out to me what I'd missed. That's because he knows me, very well, and I'd just been stressing about everything I needed to get done in x-amount of time. He knew what he was hearing and how to rein me in.

Ask anyone who knows me, and they'll tell you: I'm a glass half-empty girl. Nothing's ever quite good enough nor do I believe that anything good--except my husband--lasts (and there are days when I wonder how much longer he'll put up with me). Call it a Freudian thing, or a result of being a kid whose dad was in a coupla different concentration camps, but I just don't trust that good things won't evaporate. I guess you could say that I'm not a look-on-the-bright-side kind of gal.

I tend to stress. I tend to do exactly what Gaiman talks about. I am ALWAYS thinking ahead to the next day, the next book, the next project, when I just MUST get a new book out there . . . all that stuff. Any enjoyment--even the accomplishment of FINISHING A BOOK (which is HUGE, guys, HUGE)--only lasts for a small span before I get restless, need to move on, have to edit. That kind of thing.

Now this type of restlessness is very good for, say, a medical student. An intern. A doctor, who's always leapfrogging ahead, thinking down the road, trying to figure out what might help someone in distress. In psychiatry, you're always in multiple times at once: in the moment with your patient; in their past, trying to tie what you're hearing to what's come up before; and in the patient's future, thinking about you might do or suggest that will help down the road. But in terms of actually ENJOYING the moment--the fact that I'm holding a book I wrote in my hand?

Well, I do . . . and I don't.

I remember when all I wanted was to publish a short story. Then, it was I'd like to keep on publishing short stories. Then, it was holding a book I'd written in my hand. Then, breaking out of work for hire and into seeing my own stuff in print. Then . . . You get the picture. It's very Roseanne Rosanneadanna: always something.

I also think that I breezed past that part of Gaiman's address because I must have some fantasy of what making it to that point entails. Unlike Gaiman, I don't have long signing lines and all that; I'm not a tenth of the way to where he was when Stephen King gave him that advice. Putting aside the fact that if Stephen King liked ANYTHING I'd written and told me so and then gave me advice, TOO, I'd probably have a heart attack . . . I think that Gaiman's inability to take the advice points up a fundamental insecurity we writers have--and, maybe, always should.

A friend of mine makes distinctions between an author and a writer. Authors live in Author-Land, a lovely alternative universe where they rest on accolades, hob-nob with influential people, are quite fun at parties, tell super stories--but don't write a darn thing, or--if they do--not a lot or very good anymore. They live on what they've done. Think . . . Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner . . . or any writer who's effectively stopped writing but still has THE NAME.

Then, there are writers: people who grind it out, like golfers, every day. They do the work. They produce. They're in the trenches. The thing is, I think Gaiman was being a writer: someone who had to look ahead to the next book, the next paycheck, the next series . . . whatever. I think that, if he's honest, Stephen King was and might still be that kind of writer, too: a man who could live on Author Island but has both the drive and the inability to stop writing. Both are successful precisely because they never could NOT look ahead to the next project. Oh, and yeah, they write well.

But you understand what I'm saying. Most of us will always be only as good as the next book, which means that being in the moment and enjoying the ride take as much work as . . . well . . . the work. For me, there's the flip-side, too: when the writing is going well, I BLOODY LOVE IT. There is NOTHING in the universe I'd rather do--and then I am enjoying the ride. So, maybe, enjoying the ride is about enjoying the process of writing: the craft, the discovery, the desire to push oneself just a little harder, try something just a little different. Failing sucks, no question. But when you succeed--when you KNOW you nailed it--there's nothing finer.  What's even better is when you get to share this with other people; when you entertain them with the world you've created. Enjoying THAT ride is just as important.

I think the take-home here is figuring out what "the ride" is and means to you, and understanding that the ride may change over time as you mature as a writer and go further along in your career. Recognize that enjoying the ride may mean something as profound as holding a bestseller YOU WROTE in your hand or allowing your SO to drag you to a movie because you've put in a hard day, sweating over that keyboard.

So, be flexible. Enjoy. And, remember: it's never a bad day when there's cake.

To Blurb, or Not to Blurb...

This past week, the New York Times ran a piece, Riveting! The Quandary of the Book Blurb, where a couple writers, an agent and an editor/author all weighed in on the question of what, if any, purpose a book blurb serves. Are blurbs obsolete? Do they really say anything to a reader, or are they cues to reviewers, the marketplace, etc., etc.? Go read the various opinions; they're pretty interesting.

The piece got me thinking about my own feelings/thoughts about blurbs: as a reader; as someone who's had a book blurbed; and as someone who's been asked to provide blurbs.

1) As a reader, well . . . yeah, blurbs have made a difference, sometimes. I know for a fact that there are two books I picked up, within recent memory, on the strength of blurbs: not what was said but who provided the blurb. I mean, really, are blurbs going to say anything other than how amazing a book is? Of course not. But I think that blurbs provide some meaningful information to the genre reader, on a par with Amazon recommendations that try to match up what you're looking at with books of similar ilk.

So, if Stephen King or Lee Child has raved about a book, I'll be much more likely to take a look. Will I always agree with either? I can tell you, unequivocally, that I have not; indeed, have felt cheated and lied to by an author I admire when I feel as if I get suckered into a book that isn't my cuppa.

Which then makes a blurb a bit of a problem, doesn't it? Put your imprimatur, your seal of approval on a work, and the work also reflects on you. You're presuming on our unspoken contract; I, the reader, trust you, the writer, because you've always kept your end of the bargain. But now, you've shaken my trust. You got me to read a stinker. So I'll be much less likely to pick up another book just because your name is on the cover.

Very tricky business.

On the other hand, the important thing is that the blurb lead to a sale. It won't lead to a repeat sale, but money in the bank is money in the bank.

2) It seems to be de rigeur these days to ask writers to gather up authors who might be willing to provide a blurb. I've been asked for suggestions, but I've never directly contacted a writer--friend or otherwise. Although I do have friends who have asked me or other writers, if I were asked to do the same? I'd rather stick pins in my eyes. I would feel incredibly awkward. Presuming on someone's good graces or friendship just doesn't sit well with me. Since I've never had to make that contact myself, I have no idea what would happen if a writer suggested that the editor or publicist do this instead. Anyone out there with experience on that? Anyone ever said no and asked that someone else do it?

But as someone who's had her book blurbed, I can tell you that more than one reader said he/she picked up the book on the basis of who blurbed it (not what the blurb said). Just as fascinating to me is the difference between readers in the States and overseas. If you take a look at the ASHES US edition, James Dashner's blurb is featured on the front and Michael Grant's is on the back cover. But for all the overseas editions--including those put out by different publishers--they're reversed. Grant's on front; Dashner's on back. I have no idea why that might be, unless we're talking name recognition or one blurb being seen as somehow better than the other. (Trust me, I was thrilled to have just one of these guys on the book. Two? Died and gone to heaven.)

3) Before ASHES, I'd been asked by several friends to provide blurbs for books. After ASHES, I got, well, a lot more. I've never blurbed a single book, for several reasons. Mostly, it's that I honestly haven't had the time. Yes, I read while I'm writing, but that's usually to turn off my brain a bit, not overheat it more. Blurbing would be, for me, more work. Now, if I were to read a great book and THEN be asked for a blurb . . . that would be a different story, I guess, but then the book would've been out there awhile and why would anyone need me?

This does make me wonder about writers who blurb, and seem to blurb a lot. Either they read much more quickly and work more efficiently than I do--always a strong possibility--or they are blurbing as a favor to an editor or friend, or ... they are being PAID to blurb. Now, if an editor asked me for the favor, I wouldn't refuse. I just flat-out wouldn't. I'd find the time, somewhere--because the editor's signaling several things with the request: a) we're at that stage in our relationship where manus manum lavat; b) the editor is telling me that my name carries clout; c) putting my name on the book might actually be to my benefit, too. Then, attaching my name to a book would have the same impact as, say, introducing a new writer at a conference or festival: my name carries weight, and this gives me more exposure and legitimacy. Blurbing reaffirms me as an important voice.

So . . . then blurbing becomes very loaded, doesn't it? Yes, it's flattering; there are all sorts of implied and explicit meanings. But blurbing can backfire, not only if I lend my name to a dud (no matter what I think of it) but if I agree only to discover that I actually can't say anything nice.

This once happened to me. I agreed to do someone a favor and read his book. It was downright terrible. It was SUCH a bad book that I ended up skimming the whole thing in about an hour. And then I was stuck because this writer said that even if I hated the book, writing a review would generate hits and drive up the Amazon rating . . . etc.

Well, I declined. I wrote him a very nice note and said that the book just wasn't my cuppa. In all conscience, I couldn't recommend the book--but I also declined to slam it. Really, life is hard enough without that kind of nonsense.

After that experience, though, I've become very leery of requests to blurb. As I've said, I've been much too busy to even consider it. For me, I think that if I were to provide a blurb, the circumstances would have to be akin to those I outlined above: a favor to an editor. Otherwise, I think that, for us authors, blurbing is full of all kinds of pitfalls and unforeseen consequences--not just that we might give only a lukewarm endorsement or, worse yet, lie, but blurbing something that isn't all that great might also provide unwanted blowback. For example, I know that a few writers' blurbs, seeing their names? I won't pick up those books because of my prior experience with stinkers they thought were so great.

Like, I said . . . life is hard enough. I don't need any additional headaches.

***

For those who follow me on Twitter and Facebook, you know I bake just about every Sunday and then post a picture of what I've done, unless it's just too gruesome. [There is, I am sure, a deep, dark psychological reason why I bake, too. I've got a coupla ideas about that.] Anyway, I figured to start carrying this over to the blog because . . . I dunno . . . I like pictures of pretty cakes. Today, I had to slog through my taxes and decided that my weekly cake had to be both beautiful and bright in the mouth. So, today's cake: a lemon-blueberry done in my bran'-spanking new bundt pan. Quite the beauty. Tastes pretty darned good, too.

The Better to Hear You, My Dear

This past week saw a very welcome piece of news: Katy Kellgren, a fabulously talented narrator, is up for an Audie award for her solo narration of my very own ASHES .



Is this a tribute to Katy's skills in bringing my story alive? You bet. As a long-time listener, I love a good audiobook, and I also know that a narrator can spell the difference between a wonderful experience or an exercise in Chinese water torture. Bad narrators can kill an otherwise good story (I won't name names here, but get me alone and I'll tell you some of the worst offenders); great readers can turn a so-so story--one I might even have passed by--into something to be savored.

Which got me thinking not about the pleasures of listening to a good story--there is certainly something primal about that, a vestigial inherited memory of Og talking about the mastodon that got away or, closer to home, the deep comfort of listening to a parent read



then translated to the voices which reach up to us from the page



to give us comfort and an escape from our dull, wretched lives (or, in Sawyer's case, a place to go in his head that ISN'T that bloody island)



--but about public readings by writers.



Here's the honest-to-God truth: I love listening to writers speak. But I don't love hearing writers read their stuff aloud. The simple truth is that many don't know how. This is strange, I know, but I have been to some truly atrocious readings where you could tell the writer would rather stick pins in her eyes. Or that while they may have really liked their story, they just don't have the necessary performance skills to make it an enjoyable experience. On the other hand, I've been to a couple readings that were great--but they were the exception, not the rule. Pity that I missed out on Dickens, too, probably the first (documented) author to understand the art of performance: that reading aloud IS an art.



If you believe the biographies--and I do, especially Dickens as I Knew Him by George Dolby, who was the Inimitable's stage manager for these readings and tours--the readings probably helped do Dickens in. Still, his public readings were, apparently, quite something. This article gives a nice summary. But suffice to say that women fainted, grown men trembled--and still others, like Mark Twain, thought him as atrocious reader. So, really, how much was hyperbole?

Now, did it matter that Dickens once had ambitions to the stage? That he co-wrote and then starred in amateur theatricals? You bet. I've often wondered how many writers have acted, wanted to act, or act. (For the record, I have and, yeah, I once thought about a life in the theater, too. Predictably, my parents were against it. Now that I am older--and have been in my share of productions--I understand why.) Have I done readings? Sure, when asked . . . but I'm not sold that's what audiences want and, in fact, I'm always reluctant to read my stuff. Do I understand that readings are great marketing tools? Yes. In fact, Janet Mullany has a fine article in this month's Romance Writers Report on the topic, and some useful tips and bon mots, including my favorite: less is more.

But all that presupposes that writers make good readers, and not all do. Even those who are good at it--and I think I do pretty well--pale in comparison to people, like Katy, who do this kind of thing for a living. Yet you can learn a lot from listening to very good narrators, such as the value of enunciation and pacing. (Listening to yourself can be a cringe-worthy exercise, too; you are never the best judge of your own voice. Doing so, as well as reading to a real live human being who isn't necessarily your pal or husband, is worthwhile, too. )

A public reading is also a very strange beast because, on the one hand, people want to hear a good story. But, on the other, a really dramatic reading--think of Dickens storming and weeping and gnashing his teeth and then lying on a couch for hours afterward, taking eggs in Champagne as a restorative--may not be what your audience wants to hear or expects. Setting is everything; expectations are, too. I once did a reading at a small club with a bunch of other writers where it seemed that droning was the order of the day. I listened to a couple guys maunder on and thought, piece of cake. So I got up, gave my wonderfully splendid reading only to realize, after a lot of tittering, that a story with some sex in it--not tons, but the story was centered on sexual obsession--was making people VERY uncomfortable, so much so that their anxiety was plain. My bad. You can bet I never made that mistake again. Now, you could say I was being overly sensitive, too. Maybe. For me, reading an audience is as important as knowing what I'm performing.

But, like I said, I'm also not sold that people want to hear us read. I think they want to hear FROM us, which is a very different thing. In fact, more often that not, I'll be prepared to read something--notice that word "prepared" there; this means I have PRACTICED and quite a bit; that chapter is, for me, no different than a script--but nine times out of ten, we get caught up in talking, a back and forth exchange, which I personally believe serves an author and her work better than a random chapter, no matter how well done.

I could be all wrong, too. Witness Stephen King giving the closing address at the Savannah Book Festival a couple weeks ago. (A friend of mine was there, by the way, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.) He appears about six minutes and change into this, but pay attention to one thing he says: Writers are not that interesting to listen to. That may be so, but King also a) has practice and b) understands the value of marketing or else he wouldn't have read the first chapter of the forthcoming Dr. Sleep (a sequel to The Shining).



Now, is King a good reader of his own stuff? Not really, although he is a fine speaker (pay attention to what he does; he knows exactly what he's doing and understands the value of pacing) and I love listening to and learning from him. I would also much rather listen to him speak like this than read his own work. (And I've heard him read a bunch of his work. If, for example, you want the unabridged audiobook version of Desperation, his narration is the only one out there. The one with Kathy Bates is abridged.) For years, Frank Muller was the voice of Stephen King; when he died, the baton's been passed around to readers as various as George Guidall, Steven Weber (one of my faves; his performance of IT made a so-so novel truly superb; his acting work on the movie remake of The Shining was out of this world, too).



Campbell Scott is another fave for his work on Cell and The Shining) and, most recently, Craig Wasson (11/22/63).

But contrast King's reading with the rest of his talk and then ask yourself: was it really that good? Did it really enhance the value of seeing/hearing him speak? For my money, that would be have to be no.

How about you? Why do you think some people like to hear authors read their own works? Or are people just as happy to listen to a writer talk? What do people get out of hearing from writers they admire? Is it curiosity, hero-worship, a learning experience? What?

Cover Love--and DROWNING INSTINCT Winner!

I've got covers on the brain.

Right now, we're pondering SHADOWS covers. I've seen the artist's conception for the ASHES paperback. My Spanish publisher sent me their version for ASHES; my Bulgarian editor was also in touch just recently. In fact, a couple days ago, my splendid agent, Jennifer Laughran, tweeted a picture of the Hungarian cover. Apparently, it kind of freaked her out because she saw only that face, in very low light.



Anyway, that got me thinking about covers, in general. I am the first to admit that I have my own ideas about what an ideal cover should be: neither boring nor derivative and a story in its own right. The cover should give the reader a hint about what's in those pages. But a cover should also be eye-catching. (Note that I didn't say "appealing;" some very gruesome covers are incredibly powerful.) A cover can also be a truly splendid work of art as in this Scribner stunner for Stephen King's UNDER THE DOME.



I am so in awe, you can not imagine. And, of course, this being Stephen King, the UK paperback gave you a choice of six different covers, five of which focused on a particular character. Seven, if you count the signed limited edition.







Covers come in all flavors. Some are stock images jumbled together. Some could serve as an image for just about any book. (Be honest: how many covers have you seen which show two kids, in silhouette, running across a horizon line/field/hill, etc.? Yeah, I thought so. A ton.) Others are quite unique; they could never be used for or represent any other book.

Now, I remember a few months ago hearing an author badmouth her publisher--in a public forum, mind you (a real no-no, if you ask me)--for picking stupid covers, never including her, and on and on. I kind of wanted to say something mildly snarky like, Do you know how many people would kill to have their books published at all, you idiot? But my mother raised me to be very polite. So when it came my turn to comment, I told the truth: my publishers have ALWAYS asked for my input on a cover. ALWAYS. For them--and me--it's a collaborative process just as important as any edit. I remember the back and forth for DROWNING INSTINCT, which just came out at the beginning of the month. My goodness, I think we must've gone through at least ten or twelve ideas, and those were only the ones I saw. What I find really interesting is that the cover which made the cut . . . I wasn't that wild about it at first. I guess this was because I was still in ASHES-mode, where we were trying to get away from a character-driven cover. So this one for DI . . . I worried. But you know what? Everyone else who saw it loved it--and now that I've had a chance to step back, I agree. This is the perfect cover.



Which only goes to show what I know about cover design.

And that got me thinking about the various incarnations and regional variations for ASHES.

The original cover--which I again came to like quite a bit--was very character-driven.



Me? My initial response? Uh-oh, now everyone will think it's a zombie book. Anyone who's read the book knows that's, well, not quite accurate. What I worried about was that the cover might be promising something the story itself wouldn't deliver. (And, boy, did that creepy fish-belly eye get to me.) Not that there isn't plenty of mayhem and gore and enough chowing down for the most voracious carnivore . . . but the vision being presented wasn't quite right. My editor and I went back and forth a couple times; my agent--much savvier about these things than I--weighed in; and bless his soul, my editor sent various versions incorporating some of our suggestions. In the end, though, they went with the image for that BEA ARC.

If you've been paying attention, of course, you know by now: that particular image didn't truly make the final cut. Rethinking the cover design was a stroke of genius on my editor's part because he understood: the ASHES story is much bigger and broader than a single girl. We all wanted the cover to reach its intended audience, too, not just girls but boys and young men for whom a great adventure cuts across gender.

So, finally, they came up with this.



My first response? UGH. But not ugh, how horrible: ugh, how creepy. This cover has it all: the EMP pulse that destroys the world; that really ill-defined, mysterious and MONSTROUS face which could be anyone and anybody (sort of the point of the book; not all the monsters are brain-zapped, after all). So I thought they really nailed it.

But, you know, everyone has their own taste--and so do different countries. I know of at least one website which ran three covers, not only the final US version, but the UK



and the German.




Really different, huh? I was surprised, but I also came to appreciate that every publisher knows his/her country and audience, how to reach out to them, make them want to pick up a book. Not surprisingly, folks from the respective countries liked their version better than another's. Bulgaria chose to go with the US version:



Spain's cover is different again--and wouldn't you know, I've misplaced the darned thing. I mean it. The email has vanished; I'm just so pissed! (I know, I know; I'll eventually track it down SOMEHOW and post.) But I do remember that the cover was a very intense, deep orange-red with two silhouettes: the taller girl is clearly Alex, and the little kid with pigtails (and a teddy bear) is Ellie.

As I said, right now, we're in the middle of working on the cover for SHADOWS which comes out later this year. I can't tell you anything--much less show you--but while it is different from the final US ASHES cover, it is somewhat similar to what's being planned for the paperback version of ASHES. So perhaps the idea is to go for a certain common "feel," I don't know.

But I am curious: what are your ideas about covers? What goes into making a "good" book cover anyway? Should they be actual works of art (as, for example, the Whelan covers for King's THE DARK TOWER series)? Are book covers art? [My vote: only the really good ones ;-) ] Should covers tell a story the way, say, this one does for King's 11/22/63? (Three guesses who I think tells a pretty great story.)




And do you have cover stories--good and bad--of your own? Bring 'em on.

***

Before I forget, the winner of the DROWNING INSTINCT giveaway is Melanie Goodman! Having already read the book--and given it a lovely review--Melanie said she's giving it to her mom for a read first. To both, enjoy! To all those who entered, thanks. And for the many, many overseas fans who would have LIKED to enter . . . stay tuned. I feel a Goodreads giveaway in our future :-)