Keep On Trucking

by Alan Orloff

I must have been a good guest (or at least not a terrible one), because I’ve been invited back to blog. Thanks, Working Stiffs! (This time, I promise to clean up after myself.)

Last time, I blogged about the stages I go through when I’m about to start a new writing project. Today, I thought I would offer a few suggestions about keeping an existing project moving forward when you’re feeling stuck.

Sometimes, it can be tough.

When a project is new, anything is possible—your optimism is boundless. Remember all that crisp, unspoiled filler paper on the first day of fourth grade, just sitting in your looseleaf notebook, waiting to be turned into a masterpiece? Same kind of thing here, except instead of “What I Did Over Summer Vacation,” you’re determined to pen the Great American Novel.

But after twenty thousand words (insert your own number here), the excitement and enthusiasm may start to wane. The characters aren’t quite what you imagined. The plot seems a little “off.” The dialogue sounds a bit stilted. There’s nothing “Great” about your novel. How can you keep plowing through, once the enthusiasm and excitement erode? (Or worse, plummet like a stone.)

Here are some things I’ve found to be helpful:

Set a quota and stick to it. I’ve said this before, but setting a daily word quota—and sticking to it—almost guarantees you’ll get your project finished. Be disciplined! (I’ve said this before, too, but sometimes I get up in the middle a sentence once I’ve hit my quota.) Don’t worry so much about the quality of the work; you can always fix it up during the revision process!

Try doubling your quota. Sometimes you can simply power your way back on track, especially if you can get into that all-powerful Writing Zone (notice the capital letters).

Skip ahead to a different scene. Sometimes skipping ahead to a different, and possibly more exciting, scene may kickstart things.

Outliners: Change your outline. Maybe your writing has slowed down because, on some level, you know you’re going in the wrong direction. Don’t be a slave to your outline! Modify it as you go along, if it serves the story better. (Pantsers: Maybe you could try changing your pants.)

Try writing in a different location or at a different time of day. Many writers head down to the local coffee shop, bookstore, or library to write. Fewer distractions and more caffeine (assuming you can ignore the stares of the baristas, or all those books on the shelves, calling your name). If you’re a morning writer, try writing at night, and vice versa.

Try a different atmosphere. If you usually write in silence, try writing with a soundtrack (or with kids screaming in the background). If you usually write in an isolated place, try finding a spot right in the middle of some hubbub (train station, shopping mall, Occupy Wall Street gathering).

Talk to some other writers. Most of the writers I know are interesting, engaging people. I find that talking to them re-energizes me and gets me back in the mood to crank out some words. (Yes, I know a few writers are twisted and deranged. They’re also fun to talk with, even if they make you a little nervous.)

 

Good luck with your next Great American Novel/Edgar winner!

Alan Orloff’s latest book, DEADLY CAMPAIGN, is the second in the Last Laff Mystery series (released this week!). He’s also written KILLER ROUTINE (Last Laff #1) and  DIAMONDS FOR THE DEAD (a Best First Novel Agatha Award finalist). Writing as Zak Allen, he’s published THE TASTE (horror) and FIRST TIME KILLER (thriller), both ebook originals. For more information visit www.alanorloff.com

Working Stiffs of Classical Athens

Today we welcome guest blogger Gary Corby!

Working Stiffs of Classical Athens

by Gary Corby

Thanks to Working Stiffs for asking me drop in!

I write murder mysteries set in classical Athens.  That's 2,500 years ago!  So given the rather intriguing name of our gracious host, I thought I'd write about the real working stiffs of the ancient world. 

If you went back to Athens in 460BC, which is when western civilization began—and when my stories begin—you'd find three classes of people: citizens, metics, and slaves.

Reputable citizens were either landholders (definitely the preferred option); or craftsmen or artisans (definitely the most common occupation); or they might be a mercenary soldier (killing people for money was only slightly frowned upon).

Metics were resident aliens with permission to live and work in Athens.  Think of them like green card holders in the US, and you won't be far wrong. 

The metics had no say in how the city was run, but nor did they care as long as they were making money.  And they made a lot of money.  In those days Athens was the economic powerhouse of the world.  (Things may have changed slightly since…)

So metics ran businesses.  But it was considered shameful for a citizen to indulge in trade.  Which didn't stop it from happening; they just didn't talk about it at parties.

Citizen  A (as he sips fine wine imported from Chios):  "So, what do you do for a living?"

Citizen B:  "I import fine wine from Chios in my shipping fleet."

Citizen A:  Gasp!  Drops wine cup.   Backs away from disreputable individual.

Money, you see, had nothing to do with how your reputation stood. 

My hero, Nicolaos, is a citizen; but his girlfriend Diotima is a metic.  Which makes for a slight problem, because while marriage between citizens and metics isn't illegal, it isn't exactly encouraged either.  The Athenians discouraged cross-class marriage by declaring a law that to be a citizen, both your parents had to be citizens. 

You might think the slaves were the worst off—and if they got assigned to the silver mines, then they certainly were—but in some ways, slaves were better off than poor citizens.  At least the slaves were guaranteed to get fed.

These days, most of us get up in the morning, go to work for some big company, and then come home at night.  The standard daily grind, right?  Something a lot of people don't realize is that, historically, this is really strange: for one citizen to work full time for another is a very recent system. 

We often call ourselves wage slaves.  Well, in the ancient world, if you were working permanently for one employer, then you almost certainly were a slave.  For real.  They were the ancient world's working stiffs.

Permanent employment was the essential difference between a slave and a citizen.  The slave had it and the citizen didn't.  Your average middle class citizen was like what we'd call an independent contractor.  And if you suggested he take a permanent job, he would have punched you in the face, because that would be demeaning.

This leaves my investigator-hero Nicolaos with a problem.  How does he describe his own work?  There were no such things as policemen in the ancient world to compare himself with.  He's surviving from one job to the next, like an artisan, so in his world, that makes him…a craftsman of crime.

 

Nicolaos, the ambitious son of a minor sculptor, walks the mean streets of Classical Athens as an agent for the promising young politician Pericles. Murder and mayhem don't faze Nico; what's really on his mind is how to get closer (much closer) to Diotima, the intelligent and annoyingly virgin priestess of Artemis, and how to shake off his irritating 12 year old brother Socrates.

To learn more about Gary and/or Nicolaos, visit http://blog.garycorby.com.

City of Secrets

Working Stiffs welcomes back our good friend, Kelli Stanley!

by Kelli Stanley

First, I want to express my appreciation to Joyce, Bente (who is in all of my Miranda books!), Annette, Paula and all my friends at Working Stiffs for letting me hang out! You guys rock, and I consider myself lucky to get to spend some time with you! :)

I’m actually just popping in between different weeks of a book tour ... the CITY OF SECRETS book tour, as a matter of fact. CITY OF SECRETS is the second Miranda Corbie book (following CITY OF DRAGONS, which I’m thrilled to say won a Macavity Award at Bouchercon last month!) We’re continuing to celebrate while traveling, and next week I’ll be in various cool places from Scottsdale to Thousand Oaks, California.

So, the title of my newest book begs the question: what kind of secrets? San Francisco secrets? Secrets about Miranda Corbie, the broken idealist and hardboiled PI of the series? Or secrets about 1940 and the American past that we didn’t learn in high school history books ...

The answer is all of the above.

Miranda Corbie is working the opening day of the second  San Francisco World’s Fair, held on beautiful Treasure Island in the middle of the Bay. Stage hands find her in front of Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch, where she works security, protecting the girls behind the glass wall from everything other than eyes ... to use those, you pay a quarter. Use anything else and you have to deal with Miranda.

Shaking in shock and horror, the stage hands from Artists and Models—another peep show near Sally’s, in which young women posed “tastefully” for people with cameras or sketch pads, in pseudo-artist model style—inform Miranda that the opening act, a young blonde named Pandora Blake, seems to be ... dead. Miranda finds the young girl with a long, deep stab wound, the kind made by an ice pick. Blood trickles slowly down her white skin. And on her stomach, written in blood, is a word: an anti-Semitic epithet.

Miranda is plunged into a secret San Francisco that she—and many people today—didn’t know existed. A San Francisco in which an organization of domestic terrorists and racists can meet in a bar off Union Square, express their sympathies for Hitler and hatred for Roosevelt and plot violence against the government.

The fact is, San Francisco and the West Coast were home to many such groups in the 30s and early 40s. 

Long before “right-wing militia” became a term in the 70s and 80s—long before Timothy McVeigh was born—there were people who believed the United States was becoming degenerate, too big, too encompassing, and too tolerant. That the government was far too liberal. That the dictatorships and totalitarian regimes were on the right track, and that Adolf Hitler was a man to admire.

And they were willing to back up their beliefs with violence.

These groups weren’t Nazis. They considered themselves patriotic Americans, with names like Defenders of the Christian Faith or The Musketeers ... which is the group Miranda investigates.

And so she does, uncovering more secrets. Secrets about eugenics, and the dangers of California’s sterilization laws ... which in turn inspired Hitler. Secrets about the bucolic and beautiful Napa Valley, and the sleep little town of Calistoga, where claims of rejuvenation and health were made for the mud baths and spa treatments at Nance’s Sanitarium. And even secrets about herself, as echoes of the past reverberate unexpectedly through her investigation of two murders.

The background is a world at war. Belgium falls and France is falling. And through it all, Miranda’s at war herself, chasing shadows, leafing through the forgotten belongings of a dead girl, playing a mean game of roulette, and ultimately facing her darkest decision while on the track of a vicious, anti-Semitic killer.

Real people make appearances in CITY OF SECRETS ... Sally Rand has a cameo in chapter one, and threatened to walk away with the entire book. The second real person is a surprise  (no spoilers here). The settings are real—from Nance’s to the Club Moderne to a nightmarish, castle-like mansion in the Napa Valley.

It’s a frightening, dark and thrilling noir, and the events of CITY OF SECRETS will reverberate through future books. What isn’t a secret is how much I love to write this series, and how I hope to continue writing Miranda forever.

So, Working Stiffs ... what I want to know is this: have you uncovered any secrets you want to share? Or do you have any questions you want to ask? Let’s play a blog version of truth or dare, and let ‘er rip! :)

Damage Control

Working Stiffs welcomes guest blogger Denise Hamilton.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight. I don’t write in a clean, well-lighted room, as Virginia Woolf recommended. My computer desk sits in the walk-in closet off my bedroom. It’s a big walk-in closet, but still.

    

There is a window, but the shades are usually drawn because the light bounces off the computer screen and blinds me. There are papers and books and pens stacked everywhere, plus half-drunk cups of coffee and bags of opened potato chips and maybe a Kit-Kat wrapper nearby. There might be a cat on my lap, and a dog lying nearby, feigning sleep but watching me out of the corner of one eye in case I run out of steam and decide I need to rejuvenate by taking him on a walk.

  

That happened a lot about 18 months back, when I  was writing my new book  Damage Control, which deals with a political sex scandal, surf noir and the intense friendship between two teenaged girls.

   

As I wrote, a lot of celebrities and politicians were getting caught in scandal. There was golfer Tiger Woods and his endless parade of mistresses. Politician John Edwards and his love child with blond videographer Rielle Hunter. New York governor Elliot Spitzer and the call girl. What a pity, I thought, that by the time Damage Control comes out, all these sex scandals will be forgotten and there will be no timely news hook for me to talk about in interviews and guest blogs like this one.

   

So you can imagine my surprise (!) this summer when the Arnold Schwarzenegger love child scandal broke, then Weinergate. If I proposed either of those plot lines to my editor, she’d dismiss it with a wave of her hand, saying that such things are preposterous and that readers would never believe it.

But if there’s one thing I learned in this old life of mine, it’s that politicians and sex scandals go together like bread and butter. They are always with us! Adding murder to the mix is rarer in real life -- thank goodness, but consider the Chandra Levy murder. She was a government intern who was carrying on a secret affair with a married California Congressman named Gary Condit. When Levy’s body was discovered in a wooded park near Washington DC, there was much speculation about whether Condit had killed her, perhaps to keep her from going public with the affair. But in the end another man was charged with her murder. But in the meantime, the revelations about their affair destroyed Condit’s career and much of his life.

So when I was writing Damage Control, I realized that a powerful, married politician would have ample motive to kill (or order the murder of) his young mistress if she threatened to go public with an affair. And that was the genesis of Damage Control. The question is, did my fictional Senator Henry Paxton kill the beautiful young staffer who is found murdered as the book opens? And can Maggie Silver, the young woman hired to run damage control on the scandal, believe what the Senator tells her?

And just to make things more interesting, Senator Paxton is the father of Maggie’s BFF from high school. Annabelle and Maggie have this crazy intense relationship, the kind you can only have in adolescence when everything is so new and raw and filled with meaning. They wear each others’ clothes and eat the same things and listen to Tori Amos obsessively and do their homework together and spend every weekend at Annabelle’s big house overlooking the Pacific, scoping out the beach parties. And then one night something unspeakably awful happens at one of those parties that will haunt their lives forever.

Fifteen years later, Maggie, now an ambitious young PR executive, walks into her firm’s conference room and sees Annabelle’s Dad standing there. Welcome to your new client, Maggie. And welcome back to the nightmare you thought you’d safely tucked away forever. Because re-connecting with the Paxton family is going to bring everything back out into the open.

Writing the scenes with Maggie and Annabelle as teenagers was very intense and I’d find myself slipping back into that adolescent mindset where my emotions churned all the time. The dog liked it when I wrote these scenes, because he got a lot of walks out of it.

There aren’t any dogs in Damage Control, alas, but there are two cats -- giant Maine Coon cats, because I’ve always wanted one. Or two. I live in a hilly area of Los Angeles were we can’t let our kitties out because there are coyotes who roam at night, and they’d be potentials meals.

But I think two Maine Coons could take on a coyote. Or at least make him back off and go running back to the hills.

So it was a little bit of wish fulfillment.

I hope you enjoy Damage Control. And I’d love to hear what you think.

Denise Hamilton writes crime novels and is editor of Los Angeles Noir, an anthology of new writing that spent two months on bestseller lists, won the Edgar Award for “Best Short Story” and the Southern California Independent Booksellers’ award for “Best Mystery of the Year.”

Denise also edited Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics, with stories by Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Walter Mosley, James Ellroy, Chester Himes, Ross Macdonald, Margaret Millar and others.

Denise’s new novel, Damage Control, will be published by Scribner on September 6, 2011 and has already received raves from Kirkus (In a novel that marries celebrity culture, surf noir and the bonds of friendship, Hamilton is at the top of her game) and James Ellroy (A superb psychological thriller). She has five books in the Eve Diamond series and her standalone book “The Last Embrace,” set in 1949 Hollywood, was compared to Raymond Chandler.

Denise’s books have been shortlisted for the Edgar, Macavity, Anthony and Willa Cather awards. Her debut “The Jasmine Trade” was a finalist for the prestigious Creasey Dagger Award given by the UK Crime Writers Assn. Hamilton’s books have been BookSense 76 picks, USA Today Summer Picks and “Best Books of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Toronto Globe & Mail.

Prior to writing novels, Hamilton was a Los Angeles Times staff writer. Her award-winning stories have also appeared in Wired, Cosmopolitan, Der Spiegel and New Times. She covered the collapse of Communism and was a Fulbright Scholar in Yugoslavia during the Bosnian War. Hamilton lives in the Los Angeles suburbs with her husband and two boys.

She also writes a perfume column for the Los Angeles Times.