Never Trust Bad Beginnings

Treat for you today, fellow Stiffs and readers: we have the fabulous Linda Rodriguez here to entertain us! If you don't know Linda, you should definitely follow her on Twitter - @Rodriquez_Linda and buy her book. It won the Malice Domestic contest, which is quite an accomplishment. And can I just say how much I love the cover?

Without further ado, here's Linda:

 

I have a good friend, a gifted writer, whose year has started off terribly. Her foster father died unexpectedly. Her father-in-law died unexpectedly. One of her best friends ended up in ICU with an aneurysm. Now, her four-year-old has developed pneumonia. We’re checking for any cackling, old-country types who’ve put an evil spell on her! But seriously, it’s made for a grim beginning to her new year—and made her worry what the rest of the year will bring.

I consoled her by telling her how my 2011 began. I was already down because an editor who’d had my novel for a long time rejected it, at the same time suggesting I send it to a national contest. I had pneumonia—which is quite serious for me since lupus has left me with very damaged lungs. Once I got better, just as January ended and I was about to fly to Washington, D.C. for the AWP national conference, we had a blizzard, and I fell on icy steps, breaking my cheekbone and knee and spraining my shoulder and right thumb.

 No D.C. No conference where I meet dear friends who live half a country away. I could hardly feed myself. (You have no idea how necessary your thumb is until you lose its use for a while). It looked to me as if 2011 was going to be a hellish year, just as 2012 is looking that way right now to my friend.

This is what happened in 2011 for me.

1.       I received a substantial research grant from an arts organization that had never before given to a writer.

2.       I spent a wonderful week researching a book with all expenses, including travel, paid.

3.       I learned I was a finalist in that national novel contest that editor had urged me to enter, and I learned that even a finalist would probably get an agent and maybe a publisher.

4.       I learned that I was the winner of the Malice Domestic First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition. A $10,000 advance and a publishing contract with St. Martin’s Press. Woo hoo! My year was made right there.

5.       I learned that St. Martin’s Press was going to pay my way to the Malice Domestic Conference in Bethesda where I would receive the award.

6.       I went to Malice Domestic and had a blast. I met wonderful mystery writers who were so kind to me. My editor, my publisher, and all the St. Martin’s/Minotaur Books staff who were there turned out to be wonderful.

7.       I came home with some directives from the St. Martin’s publicity folks. Get on Twitter was one of them. With trepidation, I did—and now have almost 2,000 followers and many fantastic new friends.

8.       I came home and found myself in demand for paid readings throughout the Midwest (from the poetry book I’d published in 2009).

9.       I started writing the second book in my mystery series.

10.   I was asked to contribute a short story to Kansas City Noir, an anthology in the famed Noir series from Akashic Books.

11.   With a recommendation from my editor, I secured an incredible agent.

12.   I received a beautiful book cover for Every Last Secret from St. Martin’s.

13.   I was keynote speaker at the national conference of an important national arts organization.

14.   My book launch and other events to publicize Every Last Secret when it comes out began to be finalized.

It took most of 2011 for my broken knee to heal, and I will have to have major surgery on it later, but I hardly noticed as all these exciting things continued to happen throughout the year. That year that had such a sour beginning turned into one of the best years of my life.

So I tell my friend to pay no attention to the bad beginning of her 2012. I know she’s got the potential of having a year like the one I just had, and I think she will. My husband and I spent New Year’s Day marveling at the difference between this New Year’s and 2011’s. I think the same thing will happen for my friend next year.

One thing I’ve learned is never trust bad beginnings. A bad beginning doesn’t mean that the year or the book can’t turn out magnificently well.

Thank you all for having me as a guest on Working Stiffs. I hope you’ll all visit me at www.LindaRodriguezWrites.blogspot.com and check out Every Last Secret at your local bookstore or Barnes & Noble or at http://www.amazon.com/Every-Last-Secret-Linda-Rodriguez/dp/1250005450

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Linda Rodriguez’s novel, Every Last Secret (Minotaur Books), winner  of the Malice Domestic First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition, will be published on 4/24/12. She has also published two books of poetry, Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha Press) winner of the Thorpe Menn Award for Literary Excellence and finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and Skin Hunger (Scapegoat Press) and a cookbook, The “I Don’t Know How To Cook” Book: Mexican (Adams Media). Rodriguez received the Midwest Voices and Visions Award, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, KC ArtsFund Inspiration Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships, among others. She is a member of Latino Writers Collective, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, Kansas City Cherokee Community, International Thriller Writers, and Sisters in Crime.

Summer Music: In Search of the Lost Corpse

By Guest Blogger Steve Liskow

For me, summer music still means rock, and I still consider summer 1966 the peak of the rock/pop era. AM singles were still the order of the day, and lots of them appeared that year from artists we would learn to love.

That summer, I worked nights in a sheet metal plant that disrupted radio signals so badly that we could only listen to a local station that played the same dozen singles over and over from midnight to dawn, broken up by reading the news and weather.

Now that I often use song titles as mystery/crime titles, I realize for the first time just how many of them came from 1966. Spring brought the Rascals, and two sure-fire best-seller titles, which I don’t think anyone has used yet: “You Better Run” and “Come On Up.” It also brought us Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Kicks,” which had the first guitar riff I learned to play when I bought a guitar later that year. They followed with “Hungry,” and that great crushing bass line should have worked for a vampire story, too, but was 30 years too soon. I don’t think anyone has written a mystery about a robbery at a food bank, either.

The Beatles released Revolver (A perfect title). The LP featured the great gloomy chamber mystery “Eleanor Rigby” and titles like “For No One” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which Lee Child should have snapped up years ago. Aftermath is the Rolling Stones’ first great collection of all original material, and the American version offered “Paint It Black,” a light-hearted funeral story. The British version gave us “Under My Thumb,” “Out of Time,” “High and Dry,” and “Take It or Leave It,” all of which scream to be plotted.

So does the first—and only—Standells record to get airplay in Michigan. “Dirty Water” mentions the Charles River in Boston, even though the band was from LA. What could make that water dirty…or bloody?

By summer’s end, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels gave us “Devil With A Blue Dress,” and Walter Mosley recognized the possibilities in that one for his Easy Rawlins series.

For obscure stuff, later to be God of All DEE-troit Bob Seger and the Last Heard offered “East Side Story,” a concise little ditty—only two minutes—about a poverty-stricken teen who is killed trying to commit a robbery. The chords sound like Van Morrison’s “Gloria” with enough fuzz on the guitar to make a shag rug. Great song that nobody else seems to remember.

Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs hit big with a great stalker song that I still have penciled into my unsold series: “Little Red Riding Hood.”

Finally, in the summer of 1966, Tommy James & The Shondells had their first massive hit, and over a dozen books (one labeled as a mystery) use the title already, which means someone else thinks the way I do.

“Hanky Panky.”

STEVE LISKOW won the 2009 Black Orchid Novella Award for “Stranglehold,” which appeared in the summer issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Who Wrote The Book of Death? is his first published novel. Currently, he is trying to sell a PI series featuring the characters in “Stranglehold.” His Web mistress daughter is Captain of the Queen City Cherry Bombs, so he is also writing a mystery that involves Roller Derby.