Where on Earth Do You Get Your Ideas?--Part Cuatro

Wow..."cuatro" looks wrong.  This is what Monolingual Me gets for taking five whole Italian lessons.  I want to spell it "quattro."  Next time I make a list, I'll count in Italian.  I love Italian, maybe because I've been a musician all my life, so I have a teeny little vocabulary of music words from which to draw.  For example, my daughter and I giggled all through dinner one night in Rome, because we were eating shrimp codas.  Actually, I think they may have been piccolo shrimp, which only made us giggle more.  And when I saw that the bus stop was called a "l'autobus fermata," I laughed out loud.

But I was talking about where I got my ideas, wasn't I?  And I think I had gotten to Relics. 

I got the idea for Relics in the same place I found the idea for Artifacts...it was lying in a ditch alongside I-10.  That is the boringest stretch of road east of the Mississippi River, but I already told you that.  And I have driven it sooooooooo many times that my conscious brain just turns off, but apparently my subconscious turns on.  My ex used to look at me while I was driving and say, "You're working on your book, aren't you?"  So apparently when I leave that monotonous stretch of road and visit Faye's world, it shows in my glassy-eyed expression.

So I was driving along, thinking about an interest article I had read in a WPA Guide to Alabama--just a paragraph-long blurb about a mysterious ethnic group called the Cajans.  (No relation to the Louisiana Cajuns.)  They had lived in their rural community for as long as anyone remembered.  They had physical characteristics that could be traced to Africa and Europe and North American descent, but they had no history.  It was as if they'd always been there.  This article had spurred me to do some reading about "triracial isolate groups" like the Cajans, and all that interesting stuff was bumping around in my brain.

I had also read a very short article in Archaeology Magazine about a group of people in Mali who lived in utter poverty, but who had learned to fake out some very high-tech laboratory devices designed to estimate the age of ancient pottery.  They were able to make brand new "artifacts" out of mud and pass them off as rare and expensive ceramic art that was selling for huge sums of money to unsuspecting collectors.  I was so impressed by this act of larceny that I wanted to stand up and cheer for the Malians.  (Which may say something uncomplimentary about me, considering that I was very impressed by an act of premeditated fraud.  But the value of art is a fluid thing, and who is to say that the modern piece is of lesser intrinsic value than the old one?  And I was just so impressed that people who may not have running water, or even safe water to drink, could so successfully thumb their noses at cutting-edge technology.)

So as I drove down I-10, glassy-eyed, those two unrelated ideas collided in my mind and the idea for Relics just happened.  I've already told you about that the solar eclipse on the front of Relics is significant (check the archives for my second "A Comedy of Covers" blog entry).  And now I've told you something important about the plot.  I have to stop now.  If I tell you any more, I'm going to have to kill you.  :) 

Where on Earth Do You Get Your Ideas--Part Tres

Okay, I fiddled around for a while, but the really important "where do you get your ideas" story is obviously Artifacts (Faye Longchamp Mysteries, No. 1), because it got me a publisher and spawned five more books and counting.  And brought me fame and fortune and...no, wait.  It didn't do that...yet.  As soon as Halle Berry decides she wants to play Faye in a major motion picture, then we'll get to the fame and fortune part.
So where do I get my ideas?  Why, lying by the roadside on I-10.  Truly.  The complete plots of Artifacts and, later, Relics came to me as I was driving I-10 through the Panhandle.  It's the most boring stretch of highway east of the Mississippi River.  I truly believe that.

Wounded Earth had just made a lot of noise in New York, but hadn't sold.  My agent was saying, "If you got that close, you should write another book."  I was thinking, "Easy for her to say."  But I was also thinking about my guilty passion for southern antebellum plantation architecture and picturing this house in my mind: 

Those old houses are just so cool.  They're put together with pegs, and they're so far from civilization that the builders had to fake luxury items.  Columns plastered to look like stone.  Staircases painted to look like marble.  Railings carefully carved out of wood, because there was no wrought iron to be had.  I wanted to set a book at one of those houses.  But Gone With the Wind had already been done.  And it's not the story for the twenty-first century, anyway.  But what was?

I asked myself who could live at such a house, yet still be relatable to ordinary folks, and I imagined a woman who had inherited a money pit, but was so attached to her family's ancestral home that she was impoverishing herself to keep it.  But a big problem remained--this achingly beautiful house was built by slaves.  You can't ignore that dichotomy.

So I decided to embrace it.  I decided to make Faye, the owner, the descendant of the slaves who built Joyeuse, as well as the owners who lived there.  This was a character with depth and complexity, a character who could support, as it turns out, six books and counting.  This was somebody who would desperately dig up the artifacts her ancestors left behind, hoping for something rare and beautiful that would save the house forever.  Instead, she found the skull of a murdered girl, and Artifacts (Faye Longchamp was off to a running start...

Where on Earth Do You Get Your Ideas--Part Dos

I just noticed that I started my Spanish countdown on Cinco de Mayo.  How international of me...

I'm feeling random today.  Which book should I highlight?  I'm thinking Wounded Earth, because I'm feeling very environmental lately.  We just celebrated the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, and I kinda think I remember reading about the first one in my Weekly Reader when I was in third grade.  I've already blogged about how sad the spill in the Gulf makes me, so I ain't going there today.  I've been associated with an environmental consulting firm in various capacities since 1988, though I haven't worked there full-time since the mid-nineties.  But that's when I wrote Wounded Earth and it's why I wrote it.  First the cover, then the story:



I was on bedrest for complications related to my third pregnancy, so I was only working part-time, doing the kind of consulting you can do from a hospital bed--reports, management, proposals, estimating, data analysis.  It kept me busy, but there are 24 hours in a day, and I don't like daytime TV.  So I took the chance to write the novel I'd always said I didn't have time to write.

I took a correspondence course, and I put my heart into this project.  I took the "write what you know" adage seriously, so I chose the environmental industry as a backdrop for this thriller.  And I chose to write a thriller because I don't do things by halves, and I wanted to sell a lot of books.  (Still do.  LOL.)

I created a character, Larabeth McLeod, who was strong and smart and independent...and vulnerable.  She gave a daughter up for adoption when she was very young, and that daughter is her Achilles' heel.  When a man from her past who hides behind the moniker of "Babykiller" begins stalking her, he finds her easy to control.  All he has to do is threaten the daughter.  And because he wants to see Larabeth squirm, he reveals to her his plans to wreak environmental havoc in retaliation for the US government's treatment of Vietnam veterans.  Larabeth has built a career as an environmental scientist, so in its way, Earth is her other Achilles' heel.  But she's never been a weakling and she's never been a pushover, so Babykiller isn't going to take Larabeth down easily.

Wounded Earth was a strong enough book to get me a hotshot Manhattan agent.  And it was a strong enough book to get Hollywood sniffing around after it.  But it narrowly missed a shot at publication when the powers-that-be decided that Larabeth might be too smart and independent to appeal to their readers.  She appealed to them, but they clearly felt their readers weren't quite so sophisticated. 

Well, that stung.  How could anybody expect me to live with a weakling for 90,000 words?

I ignored that point-of-view as I wrote the next book, creating in Faye Longchamp another smart and independent woman who, fortunately, found a publisher that liked that.  I'm six books into the series, and I think there are plenty of readers who are sophisticated enough to appreciate her...and Larabeth.  So I have published Wounded Earth as an ebook.  If you'd like to check it out, clicking on all those hotlinks will take you to Amazon, where you can buy it for reading on a Kindle or on your computer.  If you prefer other formats, Smashwords has a bunch of 'em:  Smashwords

Getting this book in the hands of readers after all these years, just makes me smile.  :-)

Where on earth do you get your ideas? Part Uno...

I thought I'd switch languages.  Part Uno...I like it.  We'll count in Spanish for this series of articles.

Many writers hate the commonly asked question, "Where on earth do you get your ideas?"  I actually like that question.  I remember vividly how all my plots germinated and developed and came together.  Maybe all that engineering training has left me with an engrained appreciation for cause-and-effect.

Well, this time, I'm starting at the last book (or the next book, as it were) and moving forward.  The plot of my as-yet-unnamed seventh Faye Longchamp archaeological mystery is much on my mind today.  I had planned to set the next book in Key West.  They've got pirates and smugglers and tourists and palm trees and centuries of history and gorgeous blue-green water.  I can work with that.  And I can certainly enjoy my research trips.

As I type, however, that gorgeous blue-green water is seriously threatened by the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  I am heartsick.  I grew up seventy miles from the Gulf.  I'm sitting about that far from the Gulf at the moment.  I worked offshore the summer I was 19, not far northwest of the site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.  And Faye's fictional Joyeuse Island is in the Gulf of Mexico.  It's a beautiful place--warm water, teeming with sea life and ringed by sugar-white sand.  I cannot imagine what we may see when this crisis is over.

I spent last week "reading for a living," which is what I call it when I'm filling my brain with details about a new locale, in preparation for starting a book.  I read about the archaeology of the Florida Keys and the material culture of 17th-century pirates and the building of the first railroad to Key West and the discovery of a sunken slave ship.  Now, I've put that reading on hold.  I think I need to wait and see where the oil slick comes ashore.

There's no doubt that environmental consultants will be called in to assess the damage.  (I know this because I am one.)  It only makes sense that they will bring archaeologists with them, because so much of our history is at stake.  The Gulf of Mexico and its shores were an early center of activity after the first Europeans arrived in North America.  The cities in danger--Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola--are very old indeed.  Jean Lafitte's pirate lair, one of the few pieces of physical evidence of the pirate life that remain, is on an island just west of the Mississippi River delta.  They're going to need people like Faye to save our endangered heritage.

And it's very possible that the location of Faye's fictional home, Joyeuse Island, will be inundated with oil, as well.  Neither Faye nor Joe will take this well.

So I don't know what my next book will be about any more.  Watch this space and you'll be among the first to know.

A post that may seem nonsensical to some...

...but if you are reading The LadyKillers blog and hoping to win our fabulous contest, all will be crystal clear.

The LadyKillers is revamping and reviving and rebooting, and all thirteen of us are offering prizes to be awarded to the person or persons who best answer our thirteen-part quiz.  There are thirteen facts on the blog, one per LadyKiller, and all you have to do is match the facts to the LadyKillers to win the contest.

http://theladykillers.typepad.com/the_lady_killers/2010/05/meet-the-13-ladykillers-take-a-13question-quiz-and-maybe-win-a-prize.html

I have learned some of the most interesting things about my blogmates.  They've done things like marry lots of men and date gangsters.  Really.  And one of them had a very interesting encounter with Mac Davis.

I think my blog readers should have a leg up on this contest, so I am offering a photographic clue:

And there's even a mystery-writer-related story to go with it.  When Artifacts came out, I was trying to get some press coverage in Baton Rouge.  The book editor was listening, but he wasn't committing himself.  Being a true journalist, he ferreted out the fact that I had been Lamar County's Junior Miss in 1979.  He said, "I used to be the editor of the newspaper in Picayune, Mississippi.  I know what it takes to win a beauty pageant in Mississippi.  Anybody who can do that, be an engineer, and write a book, has got to be interesting.  I'll do the story."

Score!

And he's right.  Beauty competitions...excuse me...scholarship competitions in Mississippi are a blood sport.  I gave it up about a year later and earned my scholarships the old-fashioned way.  You know...through scholarship.  :-D  But it really was fun to have an excuse to wear ballgowns and play jazz clarinet and earn a little scholarship money by doing it.

Now...hurry to the LadyKillers quiz.  I just gave you one of the answers.  I'll bet you can figure out the rest...

http://theladykillers.typepad.com/the_lady_killers/2010/05/meet-the-13-ladykillers-take-a-13question-quiz-and-maybe-win-a-prize.html

Because I can't make sausage ALL the time...

I've been part of a group blog called The LadyKillers for quite some time now. This week, we're having a changing of the guard at The Lady Killers. The new lineup includes Rita Lakin, Diana Orgain, Simon Wood (our token ladykillin' gent), Priscilla Royal, Susan C. Shea, Camille Minichino, Penny Warner, Margaret Lucke, Staci McLaughlin, Mysti Berry, Sharan Newman, Ann Parker, and me.

To celebrate our reboot, we are all blogging on the subject of Beginnings, and I'm kicking things off today by talking about the first lines of novels. I bravely recorded the first lines of all my novels (All seven of them. Good heavens, how did that happen?), trembling in terror, lest one of them should read "It was a dark and stormy day on Joyeuse Island," or some such.

We are also running a very cool contest that you might want to check out. Every LadyKiller contributed some interesting facts about herself or himself, and you can see a list of some of the more choice tidbits. (Who dated a gangster? Who had a close encounter with Mac Davis? Inquiring minds want to know.) The first person who correctly matches the LadyKiller to her little-known fact will receive fabulous prizes. Check it out--

http://theladykillers.typepad.com/the_lady_killers/

And to reward my loyal readers here, I'll be giving you a bonus. Sometime this week, I'll be planting a clue here that will tell you which one of those mysterious LadyKiller facts is mine. Which means that you only have to figure out 12 more to win that contest...

A Comedy of Covers, Part Dix

Part Dix...that reminds me of when I worked offshore.  One of my co-workers heard my Mississippi accent and started calling me Dixie Cup.  The rest of them took a look at my scrawny 95-pound (at the time) self with my long black pony tail and heavy workboots and there was only one suitable nickname:  Olive Oyl.  I spent the summer of 1981 working seven-on-and-seven-off on a natural gas production platform very near the currently leaking Deepwater Horizon.  The death and destruction from that disaster just make me heartsick.

Ah, but the word "comedy" is in my title, so I should return to my stories of book cover development.  Onward...

The most difficult story for me to create an ebook cover for was "A Singularly Unsuitable Word."  The interesting thing about this story is that there is already an illustration in existence for it, which is unusual for a short story.  It originally appeared in an anthology called A Kudzu Christmas: Twelve Mysterious Tales, and the star writer recruited to anchor that collection (anthologies don't generally sell to publishers unless there's at least one name author and preferably three) was Daniel Wallace, who wrote the book from which the movie Big Fish was made.  Since he is also an artist, he did the cover art, and he did little line drawings to accompany each of our stories.  The drawing of a little girl in a nightgown that he did for my story was adorable but first, I don't own the rights, and second, you can't make a book cover from a little bitty black-and-white line drawing.  But here's the cover for Kudzu, just so you can see his work.



But I'm not Daniel Wallace.  What was I going to do with a Prohibition-era story about a little girl cornered in a Florida swamp by rumrunners, watching her sister be kidnapped? 

Well, there was a Model T involved in the story.  And I could hardly ignore the little girl, Lila.  So I combed the internet for public domain photos of swamps and old cars and little girls from a bygone time.  It doesn't have the graphic impact of my covers for "Starch" and "Wounded Earth" and "Mouse House" and "Offerings."  (See the archives for the past week for those stories.)  But a bold graphic statement would not speak of the 1920s.  So this is what I did.  If you have observations, for good or ill, let me know.  But I do like the photo of the little girl.  She is a very good stand-in for my little Lila, who is one of my children, just as much as any of my other characters, even though she's old enough to be my grandmother. 

A Singularly Unsuitable Word