The Thrill Begins

As my debut novel prepares to launch with a bang on Nov. 3, 2008, I thought I would look back to where this overnight success began.

I wrote my first novel at 14 when a junior high classmate ran away from home. After school, my best friend and I hopped on our bikes and scoured the suburban neighborhood, calling the girl’s name and looking in her usual haunts.  Although we came up empty in our search, the girl eventually showed up safe and sound. But it was that event that ignited in me an idea for a “What if?” story that eventually grew to be my first novel-length work.

I wrote that first draft in longhand — despite having some of the worst handwriting to ever spring from the Scottish education system — and became so enamored of the possibilities that I begged my parents for a portable manual typewriter for Christmas. With the typewriter in my eager little hands, I began the second draft of the novel that I titled, He Climbed A Crooked Ladder. The story was set in Baltimore — a city I had never been to, so all the descriptions were of my local non-Baltimore neighborhood; the protagonist drove a car, even though I didn’t have a driver’s license; and it featured a rather interesting sex scene even though I was a virgin.

I finished the novel to my satisfaction sometime in high school (a third draft was written on a fancy new electric typewriter) and it has rested in a dusty box ever since. No one has ever read the finished script, but it taught me one of the most important lessons of bring a writer: I could turn an idea into a whole, novel-length story. Sure, the writing may not have been any good and the plot was probably a meandering mess, but I proved to myself that I could stick at a story and work through it until it was complete.

After that, I turned my attention to poetry (as being around pretty girls at school all day has a tendency to do) and published dozens of horrible ones in the school newspaper. This was also a very valuable lesson. Being published, even in such a small arena, meant people could read my work and offer their opinion. As you can imagine, some people (the closeted poets and lovers of secret diaries) thought I was incredibly brave, while others mocked and laughed at me to no end. Being able to accept this criticism for what it was is something every writer needs. It builds our armor for the future and strengthens our resolve to succeed.

Resolve, determination and pure pigheaded stubbornness was something I would soon discover I needed by the semitruckful.

— Grant McKenzie 

I’ve always had a pretty healthy self image, I think. At least I used to believe so. But I’ll freely admit I’m starting to feel a little schizophrenic.

It all started when I began negotiating with my editor at Penguin-Putnam about generating a series of cozies for them. (The first, FATAL FIXER-UPPER, will be released in November. It’s about a home renovator, and it has those cutesy tips for Do-It-Yourself projects in the back. It also has two cats, a hot handyman, missing heirlooms and a few dead bodies. But more about that later.)

We had established that I was qualified to write the books, that I wanted to write the books, that I was willing to write the books for what they were willing to pay me… and then my editor said, “Oh, by the way… we’d like you to use a pseudonym.”

Hunh. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jordan Dane

Dateline: www.jordandane.com …

In the dead of winter, Jordan served as a checkpoint volunteer on the Iditaski Race in Alaska. JD got flown to a remote no-frills lodge via small floatplane that departed from a frozen lake and landed on the iced-over Yentna River. (Part of this endurance cross-country ski and snowshoe competition follows sections of the Iditarod Trail.) JD checked for mandatory gear, watched for signs of hypothermia, and helped feed the international mix of race participants.

• Jordan once sewed a 6-foot banana—complete with zippered yellow peel and bruises—and camped outside the house of a relative of Mike Nesmith, the wool hatted Monkey. (Mike and Davy Jones were visiting San Antonio at the time.) Wisely, neither Monkey came out of the house that weekend.

• Jordan created a promotional button that was named Best Slogan of the Year in a national energy magazine. The button was featured on the front cover. The slogan? “Ask me if I have gas” The next year, JD followed that success with another button – “May all your gas be natural”.

• As an architect working on the development of downtown San Antonio, JD’s father named the San Antonio River - the Paseo Del Rio.

For more information on the adventures of Jordan Dane, author of No One Heard Her Scream, please visit her website at www.jordandane.com.

By Kelli Stanley

I’m a lot of things, but I’ve never considered myself a thriller writer. Oh, I hope I can generate thrills when needed—a description of a damp, dank underground religious temple, especially with a corpse on the altar, can coax a few goose bumps. But here I was, already madly crossing genres with historical mystery-cum-hardboiled noir. I never considered joining ITW.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Laura Benedict

I swore to myself that I wouldn’t read a single review of my debut novel ISABELLA MOON when they came out.
I’ve reviewed books myself on a freelance basis for a Michigan newspaper for over ten years, I’m married to a writer, and I have many writer friends, so I’m deeply aware of how affecting reviews—both positive and negative—can be.

But any writer who says he or she doesn’t read reviews of their books is probably fibbing. It’s a sore, sore temptation to listen in on what folks are saying about your baby, even when you suspect that someone out there is going to claim it’s ugly as sin.

The early word was not great. Two out of the Big Four—Kirkus, PW, Library Journal, and Booklist—were stinkers. They weren’t just bad. They were cruel. And I mean cruel, as in, “who did I piss off to get this kind of treatment?” cruel. As a writer, that was my first, defensive reaction. They couldn’t have possibly read the same book I wrote! The other two were better, but equivocal. I knew I should’ve been grateful: not everyone gets her first book reviewed by the Big Four. I found myself saying stiff-upper-lip things like: “Well, I wanted to run with the big dogs. Guess I’m off the porch, now!” Read the rest of this entry »

By Rebecca Cantrell

My father was a teamster and I don’t have TV, so I was doubly unprepared for picketing with the WGA writers in November. I took a morning off from my vacation, googled to find the nearest studio, and headed over. I hit the jackpot, because Disney and ABC are right across the street from each other so I could walk two lines.

ME

I’m a writer. And I’m here to help.

Usually that just makes people collapse in gales of laughter, but this was a writer-friendly crowd.

Someone immediately gave me a sign and I marched back and forth in front of the Disney entrance with a group of picketers. It was weird seeing all those writers together outside, squinting at the sun. Mostly, we’re an indoor species. Read the rest of this entry »

By Julie Kramer
Once upon a time I used to produce local television newscasts and talk shows. Authors and their publicists were always trying to get air time. I ducked many of their calls. But we were always glad to feature a live studio interview with President Carter about his latest book or get the inside scoop from a local author who’d written about the state’s most famous murder. Novelists were our nemesis.I’ve decided to share how these decisions are made. Not because I feel any guilt, but because readers might find it entertaining and writers might find it educational.

The truth is, It’s a much tougher sell to get publicity for fiction vs. nonfiction. But there are exceptions: Read the rest of this entry »

By Karen Dionne

So what if you’re not a scientist? you may be thinking. Hundreds of thousands of people could make the same claim: lawyers, social workers, pastry chefs; stockbrokers, carpenters, newspaper reporters; race car drivers, kindergarten teachers, and on and on.

But I write science thrillers. My debut novel FREEZING POINT, which Berkley Books will be publishing in October ‘08, is about a solar energy company that uses microwaves from orbiting satellites to melt Antarctic icebergs into drinking water while environmental extremists plot to stop them, neither realizing they’re about to unleash an apocalyptic horror that could wipe out all mankind. My day job is working alongside my husband in our family’s upholstery shop. And aside from the semester I attended the University of Michigan, I never went to college.

So what’s someone without a scientific background doing writing science thrillers? Simple: I write what I love.

If I’d stayed in school, there’s no doubt I would have pursued a biology degree. But in the early 1970s I quit college to move with my husband and infant daughter to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as part of the back-to-the-land movement.

While we lived in a tent and built our tiny cabin, scavenged wild foods, and carried water from a nearby spring, I devoured Discover Magazine and Scientific American. In fact, it was a feature item in the newspaper about a 1,000 square-mile section of the Larson Ice Shelf that had broken off due to global warming, combined with the greatest April Fool’s hoax in Discover Magazine’s history, that formed the basis for my novel.

Sometimes, I wish I had the educational background to give authority to what I write. But my lack of scientific training presents one distinct advantage: Because I don’t know the scientific reality, I can conceive a story that a scientist might think outlandish, learn enough of the science in the fields that interest me to tell the story plausibly, and then people the novel with engineers and experts and every sort of -ologist and live vicariously through them.

I’m not a scientist. I’m a scientist by proxy.

In science thrillers, accuracy is important, and I do a great deal of careful research for mine. In addition to consulting experts, I have a trusted reader, Jeff Anderson, who is a scientist and a medical doctor and a thriller author, who makes sure I get my science right.

After Jeff read an early version of FREEZING POINT, he flagged a sentence in which I described a character as a “brilliant Brazilian ichthyologist.” He wrote: “They don’t ALL have to be brilliant, you know.”

Yes they do, I countered. They’re scientists.

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Karen’s science thriller FREEZING POINT, about an environmental disaster in Antarctica, will be available October 2008 from Berkley. Visit her website at www.karendionne.net