Danielle O'Rourke's gala evening at the Devor Museum ends in catastrophe when the body of a young artist plummets from her office window. The police label it murder and suspect Dani, the Museum’s chief fundraiser.

Self-preservation and an insider's understanding of how money moves the art world drive her to investigate who might have a motive for murder. Dani's playboy ex-husband and a green-eyed cop complicate matters as her search moves through the fashionable worlds of San Francisco and Santa Fe.

Shamus Award winner Louise Ure said:

“Dani O'Rourke is a wonderful addition to the roster of modern day amateur sleuths. Guided by Shea's razor-sharp talent for observation and keen wit, Dani shows us the world of mega million dollar museum donations as only an insider could do… a fascinating protagonist you’d like as a friend, smack dab in the not-so-pristine world of fine art and old money.”

Cara Black: “Captivates!”

Camille Minichino: “You’ll love Susan Shea’s way with words.”

Ah, where is she when I need her? Like right now, with half of the last scene in my book still to be written, and a thousand distrations around me (two of them on four legs with whiskers)? I count on this mythical being to jumpstart my creativity when caffeine hasn’t quite engaged my brain. She’s needed when the idea for a new scene that seemed so exciting at 1 a.m. is looking flat 12 hours later. And who else will save me when a tangled plot thread starts unraveling before my eyes and I freeze, seeing an entire story coming undone at the seams?

I hope you saw “The Muse” with the always wonderfully cranky Albert Brooks and Sharon Stone. I may not have the delectable Sharon Stone – indeed, I could not afford her version of The Muse. I am lucky, though, to have friends and fellow writers who perform some of the same functions, but without the requirement of little, blue Tiffany boxes in payment. On a slogging day, I can email one, who’ll give me a little pep talk. When I’m searching for a character’s uniqueness, I may see it in a friend and morph that onto the page. Yesterday, Val McDermid, author of The Wire in the Blood and  Place of Execution, visited Janet Rudolph’s regular crime author salon, and her matter of fact, thoroughly professional approach to the writing life was the latest inspiration.

Now, to get organized and into that last scene for the last time…I hope.

Wikipedia says blogging dates back to around 1994. There were 156 million public blogs a year ago, which in simple math would mean about 9 million a year except that we know they pick up speed over time. Estimates of the number of websites: around 500 million last year.

One way to be heard in all that noise, I was told, is to keep your blog fresh. Update it so people will come back. Provide comment options, and be ready to engage. Get out the word via other social media when you have something new on your blog. Okay, but 177 million tweets sent on one day in March 2011. And as of January 2012 Facebook has 800 million active users.

Getting noticed can be a matter of where you show up in Google search. There are companies that have sophisticated ways of helping with that and no, I don’t mean by burying porn words in your code. It has to do with identifying your website by the true defining terms (“mystery writer” for example) to the bots crawling around in the ether 24/7. Those companies have many, many clients who are also defining themselves with terms like “mystery writer,” of course.

A successful blogger is a little like a champion surfer, staying one length ahead of the massive, curling wave about to swallow him up. A slight error, a shift of weight that slows him down ever so slightly, and under he goes, not to be seen again until he mounts a new offensive.

The noise online is phenomenal. There are, at any moment, perhaps 50 million people competing for eyeballs and what marketers call “top of mind.” Lately, in the small corner of the blogosphere where I live, some excellent bloggers and entire blogs are calling it quits. A good blog takes thought, commitment, energy, and focus. And these wonderful authors are not sure there’s a payoff. Can busy readers afford the time to drop by your blog? Do blogs sell books? There’s no reliable data that says so, and authors aren’t feeling it. Well, if they don’t sell books, do they support the market for books? Bookstores are closing and the online market is flooded with 99-cent e-books.

Change is the only constant, and as the noise in the machine reaches epic proportions, we who blog have to figure out the next moves.

Happy new year!

I’m back to the blog after a couple of weeks off. First, I’d like to invite you to come to one or more of the handful of newly scheduled events I’m doing in the next couple of months. (See that page on this site.)  The first is February 9 in Sunnyvale. I’ll be on several Sisters in Crime panels, and doing two library talks about the way huge amounts of money are moving the art world internationally via the famous auction houses, private sales, and the experimental creation of an exchange “market” for art modeled on the stock market.

Right now, I’m trying to decide what to do with the next Dani O’Rourke novel. Candidly, the editors who liked the book felt they couldn’t justify buying it because rights to the first in the series belong to another publisher, one that wanted the second but would have tied it up for a decade as well. The book industry is rather tangled and unsure of itself these days. Many authors are throwing up their hands, heading straight to e-books they can publish and control themselves, and offering them at ultra cheap (right down to free) to generate interest. That’s even turned out to be a way to interest those same reluctant, traditional publishers to later buy the same book and re-publish it if the author has done a super marketing and sales job on her own.

The editorial feedback my agent and I have gotten for THE KING’S JAR has been good enough to make me think it is ready to share. Question is, do I serialize it for free on this site, self-publish it and the next in the series, or leave it with my agent while the traditional market stews about how to proceed in general?

Anyone with an opinion is welcome to chime in – I know I’m not the only published author struggling with this issue in 2012! What are you doing? What are your friends doing? And, Readers, is it true you’re abandoning print for e-books (at least for fiction)?

Thank you for your support and kind words about MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT and for checking out my Friday posts in 2011. Please come back in 2012, and always feel free to leave a comment or a suggestion of a topic.

Happy holidays and warm wishes for your happiness and success in the New Year!

Downton Abbey’s second season. C’mon, let it be January. I need my Maggie Smith fix. With World War I beginning, I worry that the Edwardian costumes I adored – oh, to be a pencil in 1910 – will give way to mufti, but so be it. Will Mary and her cousin fall in love with each other on the same day, or are they doomed to careen off each other in fits of pique for yet another season? And what will the bad servants do this time around?

A robot that irons. My habit for decades has been to wait until the floor beside the to-be-ironed hamper is piled with the overflow of waiting, crumpled stuff before I drag out the squeaky ironing board. I was lucky for 18 years: Tim tackled it while watching “Law & Order,” and I’d come out from the study to find neatly folded pillowcases and my shirts on hangers, and all he wanted was a kiss and vast amounts of praise, which I was happy, happy to give. I’d rather have him than a robot any day, but what can you do?

A film option for MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT. Okay, that’s big time dreaming. but more to the point than a pony, right? I mean, why not? We could pitch it as “The Thomas Crown Affair” meets “Law & Order.” You have a better idea, I’m listening.

The happiness of my grandchildren. Whatever makes them smile makes me smile too. Fortunately, they all love books. (I think it’s genetic.) The youngest is only 2 and the oldest is still shy of adolescence, praise be, so they don’t yet see me as a peculiar old lady…their Christmas gift to me!

Peaceful change in the world. Here at home, let the spirit of Occupy bloom in peace. In the rest of the world, I hope that the hunger for money and power submits to a greater hunger for the common good. But I’ll settle for no more suicide bombers in civilian neighborhoods.

A clock. I realized the other day that I am surrounded by time-telling devices. For someone who no longer has to get up at 6:24 (I never gave up one minute of sleep voluntarily) to make it to work in time for the college president’s first phone call, I have less need of keeping precise time than ever in my past. So why do I have clocks next to my bed and on my desk, in addition to a watch, a computer clock, an iPhone clock, two kitchen clocks, a coffee maker clock, a fax clock readout, a car clock, and a couple others I only remember around the start and end of Daylight Saving Time? And, why am I 15 minutes late for everything?

CD by a heavy metal band. There may have been a moment, or a song, or a party that made heavy metal seem possible. But it passed so quickly that I have no memory of it, only a case of tinnitus that adds a hissing sound to the music I do like. Yes, I’m too old for heavy metal anyway, but I thought I’d mention it in case anyone close to me was overtaken by panic about what to buy me for Christmas.

Diamonds. It’s funny, really. I’ve never liked the icy rocks enough to covet them, maybe because I so rarely admire the way they’re set. (In a crown, yes.) I had a couple once, but they were stolen in a house burglary and I didn’t miss them enough to shop around for replacements. I’d much rather have another trip to Hong Kong, Bali, or France. For me, experiences and the memories of them add plenty of sparkle.

Perfume attached to a celebrity’s name. No, no, no. I have a bit of a nose, and perfume and its origins fascinate me. My big treat to myself last year was buying a half dozen tiny bottles from a master’s atelier in Italy, and I devour knowledgeable articles on new and vintage perfumes that ring with individuality and allure. It’s not that good perfume isn’t available, it’s that it doesn’t need to be marketed with images of Elizabeth Taylor or Paris Hilton.

Another cat. I say this because at this very moment two kitties are meowing plaintively at me, stopping only to hiss at each other. They’re like siblings:

“She hit me!”

“I did not.”

“She started it.”

“Make her stop.”

“I’m thirsty.”

Between cleaning the litter box, picking up countless cat toys, filling the kibble bowls, and sending them to their separate rooms 10 times a day, getting up at 6:24 and out of the house by 7 isn’t looking so bad.

CONTEST! LEAVE A COMMENT EVERY DAY – I’LL PULL A RANDOM WINNER OF MY NEW PAPERBACK EDITION OF ABSTRACT FROM EACH DAY’S GROUP OF COMMENTERS AND SEND YOU A COPY IN TIME TO GIVE IT AS A STOCKING STUFFER!

Dick Cartter, The King of Detectives

Haven’t heard of the Sherlock Holmes-type private detective whose exploits had French readers gobbling up 21 stories in the early 1920s? Not surprising. Even though Cartter’s adventures took place in San Francisco, the booklets, which I can’t quite define as a comic since the only illustrations were on the covers, were conceived by a Frenchman, written in France and published there for the tiny sum of 30 centimes.

I wouldn’t know about them if my ex-pat friends hadn’t found a stash at a vide grenier (a cool flea market in which an entire town empties its attics and basements on the same weekend day) in Burgundy last summer and promptly sent them to me.

The stories are allegedly told by a Captain Browning, who was Cartter’s friend (another Sherlockian gesture) and are replete with pipe smoking, chasing around, exclamation points, and “cadavres.” The French is simple enough that I can stumble my way through them. Even if I don’t know the precise meaning, phrases like “une femme etait etendue, immobile et semblant privee de vie” in “La Chambre Bleue” (#15 in the series) are pretty easy to figure out.

It only adds a touch of craziness for that particular corpse to have been discovered after a horseback ride from the steamboat in Oakland to “le petit village of San Ramon.”

I’m not the only one who loves these little booklets. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley just accepted them with pleasure into their collection. I thought it was unfair to hoard them in my study any longer. So, if you’re a credentialed researcher, you’ll soon be able to find the elusive Dick Cartter in their archives. Until then, enjoy this cover!

I am grateful for

The view of San Francisco’s skyline from Sausalito’s waterfront

The view of the Pacific Ocean from high above Stinson Beach

The view of the Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Point

Farmers markets

Pho

Panna cotta

Raw oysters

Memories

Anticipation

Shucking both of those to sit zazen and simply be

And I am grateful for

You, and

You, and

You, and

You.

Yesterday I took a trip back in time. I boarded a painted bus that was blowing bubbles, said hi to a cute driver in “Yellow Submarine” era pants, and surrendered to a soundtrack that began with Elvis and proceeded through the Mamas and the Papas to the still-amazing and too damn early dead Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. It’s a helluva show, a multimedia experience on wheels, a tour of San Francisco circa 1967. Chris Hardman, the founder and creative spark behind Antenna Theater, developed The Magic Bus, and I heartily recommend it.

But for me and the woman I didn’t know sitting next to me, at least, it wasn’t all about belting out old songs and laughing about the psychedelic thinking of the era. There was a segment that had my seatmate and me, separately and silently, in tears: President Kennedy shot. Martin Luther King shot. Robert Kennedy shot. George Moscone shot. Harvey Milk shot. (Hardman could have added four dead in “O-hi-o,” three shot and buried in Mississippi, four little ones bombed in Birmingham.)

History is powerful, and history one has lived through is perhaps the most powerful of all because it calls up the emotions of the time in a bewildering, condensed, personalized, visceral fashion. I remember how I felt, I remember who I loved, what I thought my life was going to be. I even remember a favorite mini skirt (and wonder what happened to it).

The experience was a reminder for me as a writer that using times the reader might recall from her own life is a powerful tool for getting that reader to jump into your story. After all, it’s her story too. It means, though, that you’d better get the times right – Elvis and the Rolling Stones were not on the Top Ten list together. The world stopped for many people when the President died in Texas, but not everyone mourned. And a lot of the kids – and we were kids, as Hardman’s archival footage illustrated –left bewildered and upset parents back home when they hitchhiked out to San Francisco for the Summer of Love. So much material to lean on! A feast of history in which to place your characters and then see how they react to the freedom and the experimentation and the strangeness and the music that, even know, is astonishingly good.

I think that’s the lesson for me – pulling your reader into the story is what we all want to do. Anything that triggers an emotional memory can accomplish that as long as it’s true to the moment and you write about it in a way that doesn’t denigrate the truth of your reader’s experience.

NOTE: I HAVE NEW READINGS AND TALKS SCHEDULED. PLEASE CHECK OUT THAT PAGE ON THIS WEBSITE FOR DATES AND DETAILS. I’D LOVE TO SEE YOU AT ONE OF THEM!

How important is it to have spent time in a location you use for your fictional story? Can you write about a place you’ve visited only in the imagination, or in travel literature, or online? Authors of historical novels can’t literally recreate the reality of a place, so how do they deal with describing something that no longer exists? Few of us can live in New York or Shanghai or Paris for months at a clip just so we can record and play back for our readers the daily habits of residents. But I think most readers can tell when the sense of place is real, crackling with energy, and specific without being pedantic. (I do not need to know every step the protagonist takes along a street in Oxford, but I like to feel the chill of old stone under her feet.)

Lisa Brackmann’s “Rock Paper Tiger” blew me away from the first lines. It’s a Beijing that simply reeks of life, shabby, crowded, the threat of trouble always in the air.  Lisa has lived and traveled in China and her keen observations help make this book an outstanding read.

Kelli Stanley has two books out set in San Francisco circa 1940, the latest of which is “City of Secrets.” At a recent panel on San Francisco noir, she explained how she conjures up a different time in a familiar place. From old souvenirs and vintage perfumes to reading the newspapers of the day, Kelli steeps herself in the times. And she visits the places as they are today, some quite different and others remarkably the same.

My fellow blogger on LadyKillers, Ann Parker, has a whole series set in the Colorado Rockies town of Leadville late in the 19^th century. The latest is “Mercury’s Rise,” which is launching this week. Ann spoke at a panel at Left Coast Crime last year in which she talked about the extensive research she’s done in the region, in the library, in conversation with people, and even by devouring old diaries. Reviewers and readers agree she brings the place and the issues of the day vividly and believably to life.

There are other books that don’t do this for me, that seem to be cribbed from travel brochures or movies. And when I’m not in the place, I have a hard time staying involved with the protagonist unless the writer is brilliant and is deliberately holding his hero at arms length from his surroundings, keeping them abstract in order to show me something important about the character.

Note: There is a bonus for committing to doing place well in a novel: You can write off your trip. And if you must set your novel in a city’s sewer system, be sure to have it be Paris’s, as Cara Black did in a recent Aimee Leduc novel!