An Experience No Writer Should Have to Endure

One of my favorite blogs is Poe's Deadly Daughters.

Today, my friend Sandy Parshall is writing about an experience she had that completely dumbfounds me, breaks my heart and makes me furious.

You can read about Sandy's experience with a rogue book group here - and believe me, I know this is not the normal behavior for a book group!   http://poesdeadlydaughters.blogspot.com/

AND THEN - - -

Pop over to Femmes Fatales and read Donna Andrews' blog.  http://femmesfatales.typepad.com/my_weblog/

Today's required reading, my friends.

Writing Outside the Comfort Zone by Sandra Parshall

Sandra Parshall writes mysteries featuring Virginia veterinarian Rachel Goddard and Deputy Sheriff Tom Bridger. Her debut book, The Heat of the Moon, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. The latest entry in the series, Under the Dog Star, was praised by Kirkus Reviews for "spine-chilling tension from cover to cover." Sandy is active in Sisters in Crime and lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and two cats.

 

Writing Outside the Comfort Zone

by Sandra Parshall

Mystery writers know the drill: You may maim, mutilate, and murder the people in your stories, but if you want to keep your readers you'd better not hurt a child or an animal.

I've witnessed the nasty fallout that greets authors who disregard this "rule,"  reading the comments about Nevada Barr's Burn on Amazon might make any author vow never to write about abused children, so I had plenty of misgivings when I embarked on Under the Dog Star. The plot features a family in which the children endure emotional neglect, but not physical or sexual abuse, so I thought I was more or less safe there. The dogs in the book are a different matter.

Anyone who knows me is aware that I am passionate about animal welfare. I don't want to use my books to preach,  they're mystery/suspense novels, and their main purpose is to entertain,  but I made Rachel Goddard, my protagonist, a veterinarian so I could include animal issues in the stories. In the first book, The Heat of the Moon, Rachel rehabs and releases a hawk and confiscates a red bat from a man who has the crazy notion of keeping it as a pet. Animals also have roles in the next two novels, and in Under the Dog Star the issues of abandoned dogs and illegal dogfighting move to center stage.

I almost gave up many times while I was writing the book. I told myself I should write something that would be less stressful for me as well as safer in terms of reader reaction. After all, I don't have the buffer of bestsellerdom to ensure that offended readers will come back for the next book if they don't like this one. But I couldn't stop thinking about the plight of pets whose owners, after losing their jobs and homes, have dumped the animals in the countryside to fend for themselves. Rachel lives in the kind of place where people would take their pets to turn them loose and the abandoned dogs form feral packs. She would be as horrified as I am,  and she'd do something about it. I would have to pretend the real world doesn't exist at all if I allowed Rachel to ignore this effect of the economic slump.

The Michael Vick scandal reminded me that Rachel also lives in an area where illegal dogfighting is a fact of life. I grew up in the south, and I've always been aware of dogfighting (as well as cockfighting). I knew that Vick's arrest and the rescue and rehabilitation of 51 dogs from his operation wouldn't be the end of illegal dogfighting in Virginia or anywhere else. It's still going on. It will go on as long as its proponents can get away with it. But in my fictional world, where I'm in control, I can have the satisfaction of shutting it down in one community.

The book has no extended graphic scenes of abuse or dogfighting, for the simple reason that I couldn't bear to write them. I tried to be honest without overwhelming readers with sad images. I kept in mind that this was, first and foremost, a murder mystery, and it had to be entertaining and action-filled, not preachy.

It's a fine line to walk, and I know some readers will feel I went too far in one direction or the other. I'm braced for their reactions. All I can hope for is that most readers will be caught up in the story, cheering Rachel's efforts to save the dogs and absorbed in Deputy Tom Bridger's investigation of the murder. And maybe, after turning the last page, they'll consider making a donation to an organization that's working to help animals that have suffered at human hands.

Long Live The Book! by Sandra Parshall

Sandra Parshall's Broken Places, published this month, is her third mystery featuring veterinarian Rachel Goddard. It has received starred reviews from Library Journal, which praised its “sharp prose”, and Publishers Weekly, which said the story “grips readers from the opening page with a suspenseful plot that will leave them breathless.”

Sandra’s debut novel, The Heat of the Moon, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Her second book, Disturbing the Dead, was one of three mystery/suspense finalists for the Benjamin Franklin Award, given by the Independent Book Publishers Association.

She lives in the Washington, DC, suburbs with her husband Jerry, a longtime Washington journalist. When she isn’t writing, she’s either taking pictures or taking orders from her two demanding cats, Gabriel and Emma.

Long Live The Book!
by Sandra Parshall

A book is a wondrous thing, a compact vessel crammed with life and death, love and hate, joy and despair, giving us portraits of the real world or worlds that exist only in our imaginations.

All of this magic created with little marks on paper. Words.

Those little marks, with their angles and curves, can make us cry and laugh and explode with anger. They can instruct us, soothe us, and break our hearts.

The concept of The Book is arguably mankind’s greatest achievement. Humans, alone among animals, are blessed not with one written language but with many. We have used our languages for less than noble purposes – to attack each other, to sell deodorant, to explain how to use a microwave. But we have also recorded the history of our species, explored our diverse cultures, illuminated the world we live in.  And with language and books we have given expression to the uniquely human talent for storytelling.

When I was growing up in a household with few books, I dreamed of having shelves filled with them. I loved the look and feel of books. I thought I knew exactly what a book was: a bound, printed volume I could hold in my hands.

All these years later, I still love books, but I’ve let go of that limited definition. I now own more printed books than I know what to do with. I can’t store them all, much less find time to read every one. I’ve learned to appreciate paperless books. I’ve been checking out unabridged audiobooks from the library for years, and I’m willing to buy new books as audio downloads. I don’t own a Kindle or Sony Reader, but sometimes I wish I did, when I consider how much storage space they liberate.

I still love the words, but I no longer demand that they be printed and bound.  The words themselves, in whatever form, are The Book.

I know a lot of people who cling to the belief that the physical form of a book is as important as the words it contains. Some of my friends declare they will never touch an e-book reader because each purchase of a Kindle or Sony Reader pushes “real books” closer to extinction. They see themselves as sentries, standing guard over their beloved books, protecting them from a quick and terrible death. Someone in an online group I belong to recently predicted that printed books will last only as long as those of us who grew up without electronic devices are still around. When our kind dies out, she believes, the electronics-dependent younger generations will discard printed books as too expensive, too bulky, too inconvenient. The revolution will be complete.

I’ll admit the thought makes me sad (and so does the notion that I’m among the last of the dinosaurs, in a sense). I love the look of a wall lined with full bookshelves. I still love striking covers and beautiful type. Those little marks permanently printed on paper still stir my excitement and anticipation. But I have seen the future, and it is digital. Much of our daily reading has already moved out of printed form. Many people now get most of the news through their computers, and every writer I know, down to the most stubborn Luddite, does research online. I even know people who read novels on their multi-function cell phones.

I hope an appreciative audience will always exist for fiction. I don’t care what form people read it in, and I don’t care if they sometimes listen instead of read. Fostering the love of fiction – that’s what we should focus on, not a doomed effort to stop the move to electronic content.

Long live The Book!

And some pictures of my workspace - - -





 My view - -



My muse - -

www.sandraparshall.com
DISTURBING THE DEAD--Benjamin Franklin Award Finalist
THE HEAT OF THE MOON--Agatha Award winner
BROKEN PLACES

Split Personality by Sandra Parshall

Sandra Parshall was born and raised in South Carolina, and the first job that paid her for writing was that of weekend obituary columnist on her hometown paper, The Spartanburg Herald. She eventually became a reporter -- after putting together a feature on her own initiative and giving it to the editor to prove she could do it. From there she went to jobs on newspapers in West Virginia and The Baltimore Evening Sun. She covered everything from school board meetings to a mining disaster, health care in prisons, poverty in Appalachia, and the experiences of Native Americans living in the city.

Sandy has written fiction since childhood, but didn't find the genre she felt comfortable in -- mystery/suspense -- until a few years ago. The Heat of the Moon was her first attempt at psychological suspense. Her friend Babs calls it "Sandy's pecan pie dream book" because the entire story came to her during a fitful night after she had overindulged in holiday dessert. With its publication, she’s setting off on a new phase of life, and making a lot of new friends along the way.

She has lived for many years in the Washington, DC, area, and currently shares a house in McLean, Virginia, with her husband, a long-time Washington journalist, and two unbelievably spoiled cats.

www.sandraparshall.com
DISTURBING THE DEAD--Benjamin Franklin Award Finalist
THE HEAT OF THE MOON--Agatha Award winner










Split Personality by Sandra Parshall

When I see the beautiful pictures Kaye posts here of her mountain home, part of me feels an almost irresistible urge to pack up household, husband, and cats and move immediately to some remote spot where I would be surrounded by nature and spared the intrusion of most humans. But another part of me holds back, listing all the advantages of living in the Washington, DC, area and asking if I really want to give up all that.

I want both. I can’t have both.

And that, I think, also defines my feelings about being published and being required to promote what I’ve published. I want everyone to read my books. I want everyone to know my name. At the same time, I want to live in seclusion, spending my days writing with never a thought for selling.

When I have book signings scheduled, I dread them in the same way I might dread major surgery. How can I, with my fundamentally shy, retiring personality, spend two hours in a bookstore, begging people to buy my books? I’ve done it before, but I can never quite recall how I worked up the nerve. Each time feels brand new. But personal contact with booksellers and readers is important – and if I’m having a good day, and people are buying books, after the first hour I’m no longer anxious and I’m actually enjoying the event. I’m still exhausted by the end of it, though, because it’s such an unnatural exertion.

I experience the same contradictory reactions when I attend Bouchercon. I’m relaxed about Malice Domestic because it’s local (I can come home at the end of the day) and relatively small and many members of my Sisters in Crime chapter attend. I see friendly faces everywhere I turn. Bouchercon is another story. It terrifies me. I am the littlest of little fish in that enormous pond. I am as starstruck as any other fan when I pass famous authors in the halls or stand in their signing lines, and if I ever end up on a panel with Big Name writers (that hasn’t happened so far), I probably won’t be able to utter a coherent sentence. Observing the stars of the genre from a distance, I find myself wondering what the heck I’m doing there. Who do I think I am, presuming to mix with such people? The reclusive side of my nature takes over, and I flee to my room for a period of restorative solitude. After a while, I start wondering what I’m missing, and soon enough I’m in the flow again, feeling lucky to be there.

I know other writers who are torn between a need to be alone and the need to get out into the real world and sell their products. And I know some who are so outgoing, who have so much fun at appearances and conferences, that they’re reluctant to return to the hermit-like existence required to write a book. Still others move freely and happily between their public and private lives. The notions I used to have about “the writer’s personality” went out the window when I started meeting professional writers and realized that they’re as different from one another as people in any other line of work, and no label fits all of them.

The label I would give myself is Split Personality. Like a cat, when I’m in, I want to be out, and when I’m out, I’m yearning to be in. It’s a little late to change my basic nature, so I’m learning how to pace myself at conferences, how to avoid doing so much promotion that I can’t get back into the mood to sit alone and write, and how to enjoy both halves of the writer’s existence.

I’ll probably never run off to a mountaintop to live like a hermit, but I’m learning how to create my own little oasis and retreat to it when the world overwhelms me.