Tag Archive for: Maggie Barbieri

Fiction is easy; Living is hard

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We all know that feeling. Those times, we’ve stared at the computer screen for an hour and found that we couldn’t even compose a shopping list, let alone the next chapter of an overdue book. We’ve all experienced that panicky sensation that our muses have taken a Celebrity cruise through the Panama Canal and forgotten to take us along or even send a post card.

And then there are those moments, when I’ve worked myself up into a frenzy, when I’ve started checking the want ads for administrative assistant jobs because I don’t think knowing how to make a fabulous matzoh ball soup is a marketable skill, and something happens which essentially is a message directly from the Lord telling me to “chill, girl.”

I had one of those epiphanies a few weeks ago. I was visiting the M. Allan Fogelson Regional Branch Library in Voorhees, New Jersey, with fellow Stiletto author Maggie Barbieri. It was a lovely, lovely event, billed as “Tea and Crumpets with Mystery Authors.” The turnout was great (and the refreshments were fantastic!).

I had just started talking about my book and the creative process when a group of 10 teenaged boys joined the audience. While they’re not the standard mystery fans found at these events, they listened respectfully as Maggie and I talked about our work.

Afterwards, one of the boys shyly approached me, encouraged by a man I assumed was the group’s leader. The teen told me he was 14 and liked to write. I asked him to tell me about one of his stories. It was a fantasy tale about a young boy who was locked out of his home for three days. He detailed a series of adventures and dangers, and the surprise twist at the end — the hero wakes up and finds it was all a dream.

Later, privately, the group leader explained that these teens were from a program funded by the Juvenile Justice Commission of New Jersey. They were at risk kids who’d already entered the court system. This program was an alternative to a detention center. A final chance to turn around lives headed for big trouble. And the fantasy tale this boy wrote? Not so much a fantasy. He lived it.

My emotions were all over the place.

I was furious that any child should have to worry about where he will sleep at night. That should be a given.

I was worried about this youngster’s future. On a basic level, would he learn from the program, get an education, pursue his dream? Or would he ditch this chance and end up back in the courts? Would he be locked out of a future?

And then there was the reality check. Was this child smart enough, strong enough, stubborn enough to pursue a life as a writer? For all the thrills and satisfaction that writing brings me, I also know how frustrating and disappointing this career can be when the mail brings another rejection letter. The odds of a high school basketball player making it to the pros are .03 percent. I’d bet that those are the same odds for a high school kid making it as a professional writer.

I don’t know what I can do to help that child – and the millions of others like him. Writing – his and mine – can be one answer. For him, it can be a way of channeling his emotions and using words, not violence, to handle the frustrations of his life. For me, writing can be a way of exposing the underbelly of life, with all its glory and despair.

I always end my library talks with the explanation that I write mysteries because I want the good guys to win. How I hope that there can be the same neat, clean resolution for the real-life story I heard in Voorhees.

Evelyn David
http://www.evelyndavid.com/

Of All Things Super and Fat

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I was going to write about teachers, and I promise I will, but since it’s the day after Super Tuesday, two days after the Super Bowl, and it’s Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday—the superest of quasi-religious celebrations—as I write this, I need to address all of these topics. Today we’ll be talking about things that are either Super or Fat. Or both.

Let’s start with Super Tuesday. I was lucky enough (or was at the top of the alphabet enough) to partake in one of those surveys from a local college about the primary. Now’s a good time to disclose that I’m not a poller, a pollist, or a pollizer, whatever the term is. I’m polarizing and want to learn to pole dance but know nothing about polls. I can answer questions (or thought I could until I partook in this poll) but I could never write a substantive or informative poll question. So, I feel a little guilty talking about polls in a mildly disparaging way, but let me detail the kinds of questions I was asked. Then you can decide for yourself. After we got through my age (somewhere between seventeen and a hundred and fifty), my race (let’s just say that I’m somewhere between the color of alabaster and whale blubber), my income (hey, I’m a writer—take a guess!), and number of children (of the ones who will claim me as mother, just one, although I’ve borne two), we were ready to go with the real questions. Which were harder to answer than I would have imagined.

First question. “Did Caroline Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama make you more likely or less likely to vote for him?”

And already I was stumped. Love Caroline Kennedy but I hadn’t given the whole thing much thought.

“Well,” I stammered. “It really doesn’t make a difference.”

Now she was stumped. “You have to answer the question.”

“More likely?” I guessed.

She let out a sigh of relief. “Great. Next question. Did Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama make you more likely or less likely to vote for him?”

I could see where this was going but all I could think of was that I had looked in the mirror that very morning and thought that my hair was starting to look like Ted Kennedy’s. The question should have been “Did seeing Ted Kennedy endorse Barack Obama make you more likely or less likely to call Carla, the hairdresser, to set up a hair appointment?” But I decided to play it straight with her on the whole endorsement question. “Less likely?” But may I mention that my head looks more fat than super right now? No, you may not.

More relief on the pollster’s part. The questions continued in this vein until I admitted that “Project Runway” was just about to start and I needed to go. Because in my world, at this time and in this place, whether or not Romi can pull out a win over Christian is all I need to know. I also need to know if jodhpurs are coming back in style, too, because if so, there’s some work I need to do. And it has nothing to do with sewing and everything to do with liposuction. Because the legs? They are fat.

Onto the Super Bowl. I’m still in a state of shock and awe. Although I will admit that I don’t have a stomach for contests that are decided by a mere field goal and that I did go to bed with a pillow over my head so I couldn’t hear the outcome. And as a result, missed the David Tyree catch heard round the world that broke open the game and brought the Giants their first Super Bowl win in many, many years.

The moral of this story? Hang tough and watch the game as hard as it is to do it. Otherwise you will miss something super.

And onto our last topic: Mardi Gras. Tonight is our church’s annual celebration of Fat Tuesday, which is basically a pot luck supper in the gymnasium. There are silly hats, free beads, and thankfully, no exposing of one’s bare torso. (Yet. There’s also free wine and beer, so it’s just a matter of time really.) It’s a family affair and I do love me some free beads. But the weather is lousy, I have to run the gauntlet that is voting in this town (what district am I in? I can never remember when confronted with all of those tables and little old ladies eating Dunkin’ Munchkins—hey, which will make you fat even if it is Super Tuesday!), and I haven’t made a proper dinner in weeks. I owe my family at least one decent meal and by golly, Fat Tuesday is the day for it! And let’s face it: dragging the kids to a church function in the middle of the week won’t be an easy task. Even with the promise of free beads.

Oh, and incidentally, I just ordered my first pair of Spanx, from what I gather, great for the stomach fat and super tight. Stay tuned to see if I, like my friend–we’ll call her “M.”–will use the jaws of life to free myself from them in the ladies’ room during a bat mitzvah. I’ll let you know in the coming weeks.

You now have my musings on all things super and fat. Do with them what you will.

Maggie Barbieri

Editor, My Editor!

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In my other life, I am an editor. Nothing so glamorous as mystery novels, I assure you—I’m a college textbook editor. I help authors craft the “story” of their book—or what will be the overall sales handle—help them lay out the organization, direct them toward what features to include and how to handle them, and give them gentle nudges towards completion of the manuscript along the way. I’m a cheerleader with a laptop and a knowledge of what sells in a particular market, say, like the book I’m working on now, the Introduction to Dinosaurs course. Not so different from what my editor does, with a difference: none of the authors with whom I work whine as much as I do.

On that we can rely, as the song goes.

My third novel, now called “Quick Study,” as opposed to “Book 3,” as it was known for most of last year, was due to my editor on December 31, 2007. As that date approached and I got wrapped up—literally—in the holiday hubbub, the ending of the novel got further and further away from my grasp. I have never missed a deadline. Never. So, I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. I wrote when the ham was in the oven on Christmas Eve, mere minutes before my loud, Irish, family descended on us. I wrote after a serious bout of the stomach flu the day after Christmas. (I won’t go into details. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t pretty. And the kids get really, really terrified when Mommy makes scary noises.) I wrote while my kids played with their new Wii, and my husband—on holiday break from teaching—lounged downstairs, the most well-deserved session of lounging that you could imagine. (More in a future blog on why I will never be a teacher.) I wrote while the dog stared at me for hours on end as if to say, “Aren’t you done with the dang thing yet?”

It was painful.

At this point, I think it’s relevant to say that I used to be disparaging towards parents who treated pink eye like the bubonic plague. Until I got pink eye and awoke one morning only to find that I couldn’t open my eyes. And I used to scoff at writers who pronounced our profession “hard.” Until I became a writer who had deadlines. And now I have had my comeuppance.

You know what? Writing is hard. But I finished and I hit “send” on New Year’s Eve. Because I MAKE MY DEADLINES, DARN IT!

You’d think I’d be relieved. Yet, with each passing day, dread gnaws at my insides. Because, in my haste to end the novel, the best I could come with was: “And then they all died. THE END.”

That’s not really the end, but it’s pretty darn close.

So, I await my editor’s wise words, her gentle coaching, her therapeutic massaging of what I think are maybe the best 300,000 words of the lot, and not so great 102, 943 words in a four-hundred page manuscript.

And more than once while I wait, I’ll think, “they’re really not paying her enough” something I hope some of my authors say about me as I plow through pages and pages of dissertation on anything from reading skills to paleobiology.

It’s nice to dream, isn’t it?

Maggie Barbieri