Ghost Hunting

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What’s your favorite ghost story? Was it a movie? A book? A short story? A tv series? I confess I love ghost stories, especially haunted house stories. I like the creepy ones best.

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House continues to be one of the scariest things I’ve ever read. Steven King’s The Shining comes in a close second. The television series Dark Shadows and The Night Stalker gave me rich fodder for my childhood nightmares. Movies that pulled a scream from me? These are some that I remember the best: Poltergeist, Session 9, The Sixth Sense, The Ring, The Amityville Horror, Burnt Offerings, and White Noise.

White Noise was a movie about ghosts communicating though the static “white noise” of radios and televisions that are tuned to empty stations. The movie introduced me to the concept of Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP). Apparently if you want to communicate with ghosts, one way is to use a tape recorder. You might not hear the ghosts talking to you, but the tape recorder will. You’ll hear them later when the tape is played back slowly and at an increased volume. I’m using the term “tape recorder” but of course everyone uses a digital recorder. Apparently ghosts don’t have a preference.

Watch Ghost Hunters on the SciFi channel and you’ll see the investigators go into a darkened room, turn on their tape recorder, and then try to provoke ghosts to answer questions they pose aloud. Usually they ask something like, “Do you want to talk to us? Do you want us to go away?” Something that only requires a short answer. You don’t want to overtax ghosts.

I enjoy watching the Ghost Hunter episodes although I have doubts that ghosts always cooperate with the show’s production schedule. They set up elaborate cameras and recording devices in an alleged ghost-filled location, spend a couple of hours, and then pack it up. I want to see someone set up camp in a haunted house for about six months with all the cameras and recorders going 24/7. That would be a great reality show.

Okay, so why am I talking ghosts today? Because I’m going to be spending tonight and tomorrow night in a haunted hotel; one of the places where Ghost Hunters filmed an episode during their second season. I’ve got reservations for the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. My brother is going with me (another fan of the Ghost Hunter show). We’re going to take the evening Ghost Tour and learn a little more about the history of the structure built in 1886, then spend two nights watching for ghosts.

Half joking, I told my brother to bring his digital camera so we could get shots of orbs and other physical manifestations if the ghosts show up while we’re there. He agreed, but informed me that they would probably drain the camera’s batteries before we could get a shot.

“Drain the batteries?” I asked. He didn’t seem to be joking.

He gave me a knowing look.

Okay, so maybe I don’t watch the show that closely. Or take it that seriously. Maybe I just have it on while I write, glancing over at the screen when the screaming starts. I actually did watch the entire episode about the Crescent Hotel though. The scariest part wasn’t the sounds or the shadows the investigators managed to catch on their monitoring equipment. It was when an investigator’s laptop computer was moved, through means unknown, from the top of the hotel bed to a position leaning against the exterior door. That really creeped me out.

Nobody, ghost or human, touches my laptop.

Check back later in the week for updates to this blog.

Update: 4:00 P.M. Central – 7/21/08

Arrived at hotel and got checked in. About 100 degrees F. outside. Rooms were on the fourth floor and very hot until I got the window units going. There is wireless internet in the hotel but it’s very, very slow. So far the only odd thing is that I had to put new batteries in my wireless keyboard. But it might have just needed new batteries – it’s been about 2 months since I used it.

Plan to participate in the ghost tour tonight at 8:00 P.M. Central.

So far my first impression is that old buildings are great to tour but maybe not so great to stay overnight in. Nothing special about the room that I’m in – just old.

Evelyn

Ned Rust, Undercover

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Ned Rust lives with his family in Croton, NY, and works in the publishing industry. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Rocket, and The Stranger.

I work in the book-publishing industry. I can’t really say much about it in public like this because I happen to work in a somewhat high-stakes area, and, as you would have soon guessed from my nervous, backwards-scrambling sentence-structure, I’m deeply paranoid.

I don’t quite blame the industry for making me this way. I’ve only been working in the field for 5 years and there were signs I was given to an inflated sense of self-worth (i.e., people MUST be interested in finding out more about me) and over-caution from before. Like how I compost any piece of mail that has my name printed on it. Yep. Right in there with the coffee grounds and the watermelon rinds. I have a theory that the identity thieves will find my fly-infested compost bin as malodorous and generally daunting as my spouse and children do.

Except when companies use non-biodegradable stickers—“Affix this to your mail-in coupon for a free bonus subscription to Yachting for Kids!”— everything works out pretty good. In fact, the years have proven that promotional offers—and letters from my parents I can’t bear to look at—nicely balance the “wet” compost of kitchen scraps. With time and stirring, you’ll have a lovely loamy—and, importantly, informationally secure—mix within six months.

But there are things within the publishing industry, as you may have discovered yourself, that could begin to make even a well-balanced person paranoid.

I could go on and on, but this is my first ever blog entry and prudence tells me I should maybe start with just one topic. Beyond composting, I mean, which I don’t expect is what Maggie and Evelyn were expecting from me.

So let me touch on one topic that’s near the beginning of the publishing alphabet and never fails to make me look over my shoulder—agents . . . literary agents.

I mean why do they even call them agents? Who else is an agent? Insurance people (creepy). Internal Revenue Service folks (creepy). Operators in the MI5, ATF, CIA, OSS and FBI (I rest my case).

And what do they do? You don’t go to school for it. You don’t need a license. There isn’t even an accreditation or support organization for them—like lawyers have the Bar Association—at least so far as I’ve heard. I mean have you ever seen a news story about a literary agent getting defrocked by her or his peers?

Maybe part of the problem is they don’t seem to do anything they might even have to bother putting on a frock to accomplish.

So far as I can tell—and I should confess I don’t have a lot of direct dealings with them and that I know one or two who seem lovely in person—agents need 2 principal things to make a living:

1) Enough paralegal-level savvy to hoard and be conversant with the appropriate legal forms and contracts to make writers promise to give them a hefty portion of any money they might make and to understand that the generally guile-less publishing houses aren’t taking any legal advantage.

2) The ability—through experience, charm and, or, connections—to get calls & emails answered by the people who acquire manuscripts and sometimes by those who market the finished books at the publishing houses.

The rest of it—recognizing good writing, answering the telephone occasionally, light xeroxing, brushing one’s teeth before going out in public—most of us regular folk have down.

But somehow they keep on doing their thing. Even now, in the 21st century, they’re taking often double-digit percentages out of author’s and publisher’s hands.

I mean, isn’t that a weird system? And there’s like, no transparency whatsoever. So you never know if like Agent Y is brother-in-law to Publisher X.

And you never really know if Agent K really does have your best interest at heart and thinks you could be BIG, or whether he’s just treating you like a mineral claim that may or may not prove to contain valuable gems but the land’s so dang cheap, why not just go ahead and put a binding deed on it so nobody else can do anything with it?

Oh well. I don’t really have anything specific to point at, but the whole scene just makes me nervous. Speaking of which, I think I hear somebody out at the composter.

Bye

Ned Rust

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

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Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
and they’re always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.

In the basement of a row house, around the corner from where I grew up, was a tiny grocery store, run by Mrs. Bass. My mother didn’t drive and my father traveled during the week, so it was no big deal for Mom, the original Evelyn, to tell me to run to Mrs. Bass for some bologna (my favorite), or a can of peas (nobody’s favorite), or just a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes (unfortunately, my mother’s favorite).

But the point is, no one thought it unusual to send a little girl of six around the corner, nor did I have to take any money with me, because I could just tell Mrs. Bass to charge it and head for home.

In contrast, I was walking my daughter to her elementary school, which is all of a block and half away, until she was 10 years old. Even if we concede that I’m a worrywart, just about everyone in the world agrees that life ain’t what it used to be. Today we all think we need to watch our kids a lot closer than those days years ago when your mom opened the door at 8 in the morning and she didn’t see you again until suppertime. I’m not totally convinced that it was really a more innocent time, but we certainly believed that bad things couldn’t happen on Coldspring Lane.

In any case, that sense of familiarity, of a place where everyone knows your name, seems to have gone the way of rotary dial phones. The grownups on Coldspring Lane knew all the kids and would have certainly reported any serious misbehavior to the parents of an errant child. Today, I know my neighbors on either side of my house, but I only have a nodding acquaintance with the people across the street. Maybe it’s because I live in a metropolitan area where people move in and out faster than, as we say in these parts, a New York minute?

Sometimes I really miss that sense of familiarity. Other times, and maybe it’s because as I grow older I also grow more crotchety, I don’t want everyone to know my business anymore. There is an interesting variation on the neighborhood concept — one we couldn’t have forseen all those summer days ago. While I may not know everyone in my town, thanks to the Internet, I now have friends and can keep in close touch with people around the world. Writing Murder Off the Books helped me move into a new part of a virtual town. I may kvetch about all the promotion necessary to market a new book, but in truth, I treasure the opportunities I’ve had to meet new people, sometimes in person, often online. My neighborhood has grown exponentially larger. And while not everyone knows my name, Evelyn David, we’re working on it. I remember with great fondness the old friends on Coldspring Lane; but this new neighborhood is pretty swell.

Evelyn David

To Breed or Not to Breed…

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I have a confession to make.

I bought my dog from a breeder.

I know. It’s not the most socially responsible thing to do. I have heard it time and again and I walk the streets of my little village with my West Highland Terrier, Bonnie. “Is that a purebred?” I’m asked, sometimes with just vaguest hint of disdain.

“Yes, yes!” I want to cry. “I’m sorry! But I’m allergic and this breed is supposed to be hypo-allergenic.” (They’re not…at least to me who has superhero-sized allergies.) I want to continue, “They are supposed to be great with kids and easy to have around.” (All true.) And as I look at Fido, on the leash of the person I’m talking to, staring back at me with his golden retriever face with his dachshund-shaped body, I know the answer to the question I inevitably ask. “What’s your dog?”

“Oh, just a mutt. I rescued him.”

And then I feel bad about myself. (As if I need another reason.)

Five years ago, I got the hankering for a dog. I knew it would be a lot of work and that our collective lifestyle would have to change but the kids promised that they would help. Isn’t that great? (And a big, fat lie?) Anyway, here we sit, years later, with Bonnie, our beautiful and devoted West Highland Terrier who just might be the best dog ever. We adore her. And the kids do help with her, which from what I hear from my other friends with pets, is a miracle.

But since I’ve been out and about with her, I am mostly encountering rescued dogs and their owners. In the past several weeks alone, no fewer than three of my friends adopted dogs and the situation has been nothing but positive on all accounts. My best friend from college used to work at Animal Planet and feels very strongly that animals should be rescued not bought, although she has bonded with Bonnie the Westie . Her adamant opinion on rescue resulted in the adoption of Riley by mutual friends of ours, on whom the jury is still out. (Riley, that is, not our mutual friends.) Riley is an adorable beagle who was inexplicably abandoned and rescued by my friends. Riley seems to be smiling all the time, but according to my friend, it is the smile of the devil. Riley has yet to adapt to behavior in polite society, but still, we hope.

Another friend just adopted a poodle/Jack Russell Terrier mix named Pedro. Pedro is three, fully housebroken, and has adapted to life with my friend, her husband, and their four daughters like a fish to water. He now resides in a beautiful home on two acres and much to my surprise, sleeps between my normally-fastidious friend and her husband IN THEIR BED. (My dog sleeps on a pillow NEXT to my bed and yes, there is a difference.) No comment. Pedro is a very lucky dog and on the day I met him, conveyed his enthusiasm for his new living situation by attempting to give me a tour of his new digs as if to say, “Can you believe how good I’ve got it?!”

Yet another friend adopted a Great Dane/St. Bernard mix to add to their family of four dogs. When I showed my son a picture of Bruno, the new pup, he looked at me and said incredulously, “Do they have FIVE dogs now? And do you see the size of his paws?” Yes to both, son. And they love each and every one equally. Bruno was a dog that had been sent to a shelter where at the tender age of ten weeks, surely would have met his maker. He had been rescued from a flood-ravaged region of the United States with his sister and his brother, who I’m happy to report, have also been rescued by East Coast families. He’s fitting in quite well with the rest of the brood, with only one of his brothers exhibiting the least bit of jealousy at the new arrival. (He’ll get over it—like humans, everyone adjusts to a new family member. Eventually.)

And yet another friend has rescued two greyhounds. Greyhounds, you say? Me, too. They’ve never been a breed that has interested in me, and the aforementioned Pedro family had one whose breath stunk to high heaven. And then I met my other friend’s two dogs and fell in love with both of them, although the female and I appeared to have developed a deeper bond. They are gentle, loving, quiet, and good natured, which in my book are all of the qualities you would want in a dog (and a spouse, obviously).

The time may come when I’m ready for another dog—actually that time has already come but I’m not sure everyone is on board with the plan—and I think I will go the rescue route. We had a purebred Golden Retriever—the pick of the litter, no less—when I was growing up who unfortunately succumbed to a genetic disorder before his second birthday. The mutts, from what I hear, are heartier and healthier than the pure breeds, another thing to recommend them. My poor dog, Bonnie, suffers from skin allergies and a sensitive stomach and I do wonder if she had a more colorful genetic makeup if she’d suffer less. It’s anyone’s guess. But when Pedro’s new owner described the animal shelter to me and the number of animals there needing homes, it gave me pause. I’m able to control my allergies to my dog with consistent hand washing and vacuuming, so what would another supposedly hypo-allergenic dog (like Pedro) bring to the mix in terms of discomfort? Probably not a lot.

So, a show of hands please: is it time to give Bonnie a rescued playmate?

Maggie Barbieri

Alas, No Ghostly Visitation

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Hubby and I chose to stay in Room 17 of the Bella Maggiore Bed and Breakfast in Ventura CA because the room is supposed to be haunted. We did not have a ghostly visitor. My daughter looked up the ghost and said it was because the ghost, a prostitute in her former life, only visited men who stayed in the room by themselves. Guess I ruined it.

However, we did have a rather intimate romantic encounter with a real live young man. Room 17 opens on a balcony shared with another larger room. There are no windows in these rooms, only doors that open to the balcony with no screen door and a transom. We were sitting in our room with the door open, when this darling young man popped in to inform us he was having a surprise party for his girlfriend’s birthday at 10 p.m. on our shared balcony complete with music, a Spanish harp and guitar along with a singer. We were invited.

Both of us were tired, but assured our visitor we’d enjoy the music. Of course we had to shut the door and the drapes in order to go to bed, because the chairs and table were only a few feet from our room. At 10 p.m. the music began. It was lovely and very romantic. It was over by 11.

The next day, after we’d had our wonderful breakfast and hubby was transporting our bags to the car, I was sitting on the bed with door open and in pops the young lover. He wanted to know if we’d enjoyed the music, I assured I’m had. I said, “I hope your fiancee appreciates you, not many men are as romantic.” She came out and I met her (cute young thing) and told her that her boyfriend was definitely a keeper. He said, “Thank you.”

From there we went to the Premiere Author event at the Crowne Plaza hotel. Though it was nice, we didn’t have much traffic. The talks about writing and poetry reading were scheduled back-to-back with no time in-between for the attendees to step into the book room. I sold two books and I don’t think anyone else sold more than one. Of course, the organizers realized they’d made a mistake. But it was wonderful to see and smell the ocean air.

From there, we headed to the Bank of Books (bookstore in a former bank) and set up for a talk about mystery writing. This was planned spur of the moment, so didn’t expect much of a turn-out and I was right. Three people came to hear me and we all had fun. We will plan another event, with a bigger lead-in time for the fall.

No matter what, we had a good time. We spent Saturday night in our youngest daughter’s new home, beautiful and huge. Five bathrooms! Can’t imagine having to clean them all. Of course she says my grandchildren are responsible for their own. (They’re grown or nearly grown, so it is possible this might happen.)

After a great breakfast, we left the cool temperatures by the ocean and headed back to the hot temperatures of the San Joaquin Valley.

This week I’m helping out at Vacation Bible School. Actually had fun with the fifth and sixth graders that I had to keep track of.

Marilyn

Captcha Tyranny

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You would think that a mystery writer would like word puzzles. And I do, but not the kind currently being used on the internet to sort out humans from machines in the no-holds-barred war against SPAM (unwanted, unsolicited emails or messages sent in bulk by electronic means).

A Captcha is defined on Wikipedia as a “Completely Automated Public Turing Test.” What’s a Turing Test? A test to see if a computer can respond like a human. Captchas are sort of a reverse Turing Test. A computer tries to determine if it’s interacting with a human or another computer.

More and more often you will be required to answer a Captcha before posting a blog, sending an email, or even sending a “friend” request on social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) The Captcha is a series of letters and sometimes numbers that are distorted, stacked on top of one another or otherwise obscured by background images. You are required to decipher the Captcha and type it correctly into a box underneath the image. You don’t have to worry with whether or not the letters are upper or lower case. You just have to figure out what the letters are. And it’s not that easy.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have a hard time convincing computers that I’m human. On an average it takes me four or five wrong answers, before the computer accepts my solution. The following are actual Captchas I’ve been confronted with in the last few days.

If you look at this Captcha it’s not too hard to solve. My eyes tell me it’s one of two possible strings – IMGIFM or IMGIFRN.

This second Captcha is solvable – CSSQCNE – assuming that you remember what a cursive Q looks like.

But look at the Captcha below. Is the first character an F? Or is that just a line in the Captcha to obscure the other letters? FHJTSXY maybe. Is there just one large T or two smashed together?

Okay – what’s the answer for the Captcha below? DUOHZK? Or DUDVZK or DUCLVZK or DUCHZK? Could be any of them. What a headache!

There is usually an option to ask for another Captcha to solve or a “handicap” symbol to click if you get stuck. Theoretically, if you click on the handicap symbol you are supposed to get an audible recitation of the Captcha and then you just type what you hear. I tried that a few times. Usually the audio file would not play correctly on my computer – think soft, quick mumbles of sounds. Nothing I could identify.

Sometimes I just let the computer win. Often I decide that whatever I’m trying to post or whoever’s group I’m trying to join is just not worth the effort.

Remember “Hal” from the 1968 movie “2001 – A Space Odyssey”? Hal was a computer on a space ship who took control away from the astronauts on board. Hal would love Captchas. I don’t.

Evelyn

Testing the Market

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Pat Browning is a refugee from California, where she was a travel agent, legal secretary and award-winning reporter, but not all at once. Now retired and dodging tornadoes in her native Oklahoma, she’s writing her second mystery starring – surprise! – a small-town reporter.

Blogs, podcasts, book trailers, Web sites, talk radio – so many shiny toys to keep a writer from writing. Promotion, who needs it? Every author, that’s who. If you’ve written a book, crank up the promotion wagon and get the show on the road.

With my first mystery, Full Circle, I did it the traditional way and learned everything the hard way. Now I’m at it again, only this time I’m promoting a mystery that isn’t finished. It’s called test marketing.

At a workshop in Northern California a few years ago, literary agents Michael Larsen and Elizabeth Pomada critiqued first-page submissions. One of their handouts was titled “15 Ways to Test-Market Your Book to Guarantee Its Success.” I didn’t have a book to test market at the time but I kept that handout and I’m ready to give it a try.

The 15 ways are much too detailed for a blog, but I’m looking at No. 6.

You can test-market the manuscript for a novel or a proposal for a nonfiction book. Once you finish your proposal, use the Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul recipe for making sure your work is 100%: Send it to 40 readers. Have them grade your humor, your anecdotes and your work as a whole on a scale of one to ten. The more specific you are in the feedback you want, the more helpful your readers will be.

Get feedback from your networks before submitting or publishing your book. If you are a speaker, make every audience a focus group for your book. Whether you’ve sold your book to a publisher or not, as soon as you integrate your initial feedback into your finished manuscript, print it single spaced, back to back and have it bound in small quantities. Call it “A Special Limited Edition.”

Sell copies at your talks and offer those who give you feedback on it an autographed book and an acknowledgment in the published edition. Keep adding changes before you reprint, and keep reprinting until your audiences run out of suggestions. The primary object of this edition isn’t to make money but to get feedback on the manuscript. After you’ve received all of the feedback you can get, reread the manuscript to see if you can find changes worth making. Then integrate the changes into the manuscript.

I’m starting small, and on the Internet. By the time you read this I’ll have a do-it-yourself Web site up and walking, with the first three chapters of my work-in-progress, a mystery I’m calling Solstice. I’m soliciting comments and suggestions. The URL is www.prairiegal.net.

Warning: It’s a cozy or amateur sleuth mystery — no steamy sex scenes, very little blood on the floor. Constructive criticism will be welcome. Destructive comments – do I need to tell you what will happen to those?

And moving right along … I’ve hit a small pothole on my road to Web site building, but at the very least, Chapter 1 will be there, with an e-mail link back to me so you can tell how why you really, really love it, or hate it. With luck, all three chapters will be up. If not, I hope you’ll keep checking back.

Meantime, take a look at the Larsen-Pomada Web site at www.larsen-pomada.com. You’ll find a lot of good tips for writers, including the famous 15 Ways to Test-market Your Book to Guarantee Its Success.

Bowing out now, with a big THANK YOU to Evelyn David for inviting me to the party.

Pat Browning

Adventures in Nature

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Full Disclosure: I’m not an outdoor girl. My idea of camping is a hotel without room service. And yet, I’ve just returned from one of the best vacations I’ve ever had…and me and nature mixed it up.

The husband and I headed off to Bar Harbor a week ago. Let’s just say that the loooooong car ride did not bode well for an anniversary celebration. But a good night’s sleep and some pancakes with native wild blueberries, made me believe that the husband could live another day. Bar Harbor is a quaint village by a restless ocean. It’s got a library to die for…and Acadia National Park.

I’ve been to parks before – but they’ve always been little preserves of nature in the midst of concrete (think Central Park). But this was acres of lush foliage, filled with incredible contrasts from a sandy beach to a soaring peak. We hiked about five miles through the park, and while I won’t try to convince you that I scaled Mt. Everest in sandals, I’d like to think I held my own with Mother Nature. Frankly, I wanted a brass band to play when I used the outhouse provided for hikers, but I suspect that I don’t get to be called Nature Girl until I really get back to nature, if you catch my drift. All that hiking stirs up an appetite so we ended our trek at the Jordan Pond House – with scrumptious popovers and fish chowder.

Alas, our time in Bar Harbor was way too brief, but we’re already planning a return trip. We next headed to Prince Edward Island, across a nine-mile bridge. There we found clean air, rolling green farmland, and lighthouses that dot the rocky shores of the cool crisp waters. But though I’d never been to PEI before, I felt immediately at home, thanks to the delightful series by Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables. Exactly one hundred years ago, we were first introduced to the fictional PEI town of Avonlea and the red-haired orphan Anne (with an “e,” as she insisted) Shirley stole into our hearts.

Of course, there is a commercial side to this native heroine. Tourism is as big a crop as the native potatoes and strawberries grown here. In Charlottetown Centre, there is an Anne Shirley shop, where a saleswoman dressed in a period costume, also sported a tongue stud. There are Anne Shirley chocolates, Anne Shirley soda (red, because Anne declares, “I love bright red drinks, don’t you? They taste twice as good as any other color.”), and Anne Shirley dolls, books, and DVDs.

I bought a new copy of the book from the tongue-studded Anne, and reveled once again in the never-out-of-date story of the little girl with the “vivid imagination,” who roamed the natural paradise of Prince Edward Island. I’m not quite ready for my Girl Scout nature badge, but my stay in nature sparked my own “vivid imagination.” How about murder in a national park?? But the amateur sleuth stays in a quaint Bed and Breakfast with indoor plumbing??

Evelyn David

Reentry is a…

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…well, if I have to spell it out…

Anyway, I’m back from San Francisco, the City by the Bay, and my favorite next to my hometown, New York. The trip was fun-filled, exercise-filled, food-filled. We are ful-filled, as a result. The first part of the trip was work, if you consider talking about yourself and your books work. (I don’t.) A piece of advice: if you live in the Bay Area and can get yourself to San Mateo, run, don’t walk, to the M Is for Mystery bookstore on Third Avenue. I was fortunate enough to have been invited to do a signing/reading there (a shout out to my two new friends, Judi, the Millbrae librarian and Kevin, a fellow East Coaster now West Coaster) and was amazed by their stock, their staff, and all of the extras they offer. I got a lovely M Is for Mystery baseball hat which I sported around San Francisco while I was there. The store is owned by a charming man named Ed Kaufman and he is a mystery aficionado. Anything that you might want, he has. He has the most impressive collection of signed first editions (including Extracurricular Activities!) I’ve ever seen and I was fortunate to pick up a copy of Lisa Lutz’s second book, Curse of the Spellmans (more on that later).

Since I was traveling with two teenage girls, most of our trip was spent shopping and eating, although we did manage to get in some culture while we were there, hitting the DeYoung museum. The DeYoung is a nice, manageable museum in terms of size and boasts a tower from which you can take in a panoramic view of San Francisco. It’s not high enough to be scary for those of us who fear heights, but it is high enough to get a bird’s eye view of this fabulous city. But I still wouldn’t get too close to the glass. I did that at Coit Tower and managed to bang my forehead right into the protective plexiglass, alarming the other Tower-goers and forcing my two teen companions to disavow any knowledge of me as a person.

We also made a trip to the Palace of Fine Arts, a spectacular structure, in my opinion. There is a hands-on science museum on the grounds called The Exploratorium, and any fears that I had that this would skew young and not be interesting to the teens were soon squashed. While they ran around the museum taking in all of the experiments (including one which challenges your sense of convention by having you drink from a toilet that has been configured into a water fountain), I sat on a bench and people watched, which is probably one of my favorite hobbies. The parade of Bermuda shorts paired with sandals and socks was just too spectacular to miss.

Our afternoons were spent refueling (the girls) and reading (me). (I wore them out, what with my insistence that we climb every hill in the city.) While I was traveling, I started reading The Spellman Files, Lisa Lutz’s first novel about a family of San Francisco private investigators, which couldn’t have been a better pick, not only because it was set in the city I was visiting but because it was one of the most entertaining reads I have consumed in a while. If you have a chance, get yourself a copy (now in paperback). This is not your ordinary family—one of the family members begins her P.I. career at the tender age of six—nor is it your run-in-the-mill story or plot. I promise you that you will be entertained. I started the second book, the aforementioned Curse of the Spellmans, during the trip as well and enjoyed it equally, if not a bit more because I had gotten acquainted with the characters already.

The best part of the trip was reconnecting with two old friends (shout out to Rose and Chris!) who attended the book signing, shuttled me around San Francisco and Sausalito, and made my trip very special. I can’t begin to tell you both how much I appreciate your support.

So back to reentry…it’s tough (I’ve cleaned up my act a little bit…but the old profane Maggie will return soon). I still have jet lag four days after arriving home, I can’t find my phone charger, my suitcase is still open in my bedroom filled with dirty clothes, and I’m way behind on work. Was it worth it? Without a doubt.

Maggie Barbieri

Writers Critique Groups

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Some writers hate them and others swear by them. I’m in the latter group. I was first introduced to critique groups back when I was writing my first book that was published, Two Ways West. I couldn’t find a critique group where I lived, but my sister found one and took my manuscript chapter by chapter. Because I wasn’t there, they were merciless. But I was glad they were. Author Francine Rivers was a part of that group.

I didn’t have a clue what point-of-view meant and when they told my sister I had point-of-view problems I told her I only knew what it meant to have a point-of-view. They managed to get across to her and then to me about POV.

When we moved to where we live now, I discovered a notice in the paper for a writers’ critique group and I could hardly wait. I’ve belonged to that group ever since. It changed over time, as well as the people who attend. In the beginning, there were so many people we didn’t always get to read. But if you missed, then you were first the next time.

From time to time, the group grew smaller, always to those most committed to making their writing better. For a long while, we had a wonderful leader named Willma Gore. She taught me so much about every aspect of writing. She eventually left us too, and moved on. Now she’s busy teaching writing in Sedona AZ and still selling articles. Over 80, she just returned from what she says is her last book tour–but I don’t believe it.

Now, our group consists of the very woman who actually started the group before I was a part of it, a young school teacher writing children’s books, a retired rancher who is also writing a children’s book, and various others who show up from time to time.

I feel it’s imperative to run my book by the group. It’s amazing what suggestions they each come up with. I don’t always agree, but they make me think and make some kind of change. Once I’ve read the whole book through, since I’m two books ahead, I can take the time to do this, I’ll send it off to my good friend, Willma, for a final edit.

After that I’ll go through it one last time and send it off to my publishers–and you can be sure the editor there will also find things to change. By that time, unless it destroys the plot or is illogical, I don’t argue. I’m ready to move onto my next project.

For me, having a critique group to run my novels by has been invaluable.

Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com