Here in coastal California, true winter is a short season. The period when temperatures might drop below freezing in anything but the deepest inland valleys is only about five weeks long. We get a dusting of snow on our little mountain (under 2,000 feet) about every other year, but have to take pictures of it quickly before the sun hits it at midday. Right about the time my friends on the East Coast are developing lower back problems from shoveling snow, the acacia and daphne and camellias are starting to bloom, with flowering plum next in line.

We get the bulk of our annual rainfall between December and April, and after that it’s so unusual that the weather people comment on air about a few drops in June, September, or October.

In fact, a lot of people here go looking for winter. At the same time New Yorkers are heading for Florida and the Bahamas in droves, we’re bolting skis on the roof of our cars, packing chains, and heading up to the Sierrra – our real mountains – in hopes of finding the deep snow and freezing weather that promise good sport.

What my family realized when we moved here and did it the first time blew us away. About the seventh day, when your clothes are too damp to get completely dry at night, and your lips are chapped, and the cold’s getting into your bones, you bolt the skis on the roof of the car again, and drive right out of winter! Four hours after that last bit of ice down your neck and you’re sniffing spring flowers, hearing birds chirp, and shedding sweaters for polo shirts.

Now that’s my kind of winter!

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.

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!

A year ago, I wrote a blog for LadyKillers, where I blog every other Tuesday, on the assigned topic: Where do you find inspiration as a writer? I’ve updated it here because one can never have too much inspiration, right?

Just finished the highly praised “The Lock Artist” by Steve Hamilton. It’s a strong, compelling story in which the author juggles time, doling out bits of the protagonist’s history in parallel to what’s going on in the more recent past. Time shifts can be hard to pull off and Hamilton does a great job, even if I got a little fatigued shifting gears occasionally. Recommended.

In one of her early books, Sue Grafton has Kinsey hide in a trash bin, as I recall. We don’t know any more than Kinsey whether or not the lid will suddenly be ripped off and she’ll be battered. I still recall the tension I felt – my pulse was pounding. How did she do that?

Cara Black’s scene-setting leaves me with such a clear picture of wet cobblestones on cold Paris nights that my feet feel cold. She can conjure that up in descriptions that don’t leave me thinking of the actual words she writes, only of the darkness of the night. I know how Cara does it: She walks those pavements at night in the rain!

Lee Child’s dialogue pushes the plot along at high speed, and Gar Anthony Haywood’s characters talk like real people – he’s got the gift.

Laurie King echoes Sherlock Holmes in more than one way in her Mary Russell mysteries – she knows how to keep me guessing as to the identity of the murderer. Like Conan Doyle, she seems to relish playing hide and seek with the reader, but always playing fair.

Lately, I’ve been reading perhaps too much R.D. Wingfield, whose Detective Inspector Frost stumbles his way to case-solving, cursing, smoking, and annoying other people every step of the way. I say “Too much” because I realize Wingfield doesn’t let Frost grow much, and even his speech gets repetitive if you read too many of the novels in a row. Plus he (Frost, I mean) has a pretty one-dimensional view of women

How about you? Any good sources of writing inspiration to share?

To blog or not to blog, that is the question. A few years ago, the answer for a crime writer who wanted any chance of standing out in the crowd was a resounding yes. The air was full of panel discussions, advice columns – and blogs – on the value of social media in bringing readers to your books. Publishers increasingly controlled by bottom line realities weren’t spending as much on mid-list and new authors publicity so we had to do it ourselves. And we did.

Thousands of blogs sprang up, assisted by simple and clever software programs generously put out there by companies that seemed to survive on less revenue than bookstores or lemonade stands. At first, I bookmarked like crazy. I mean who wouldn’t want to read a weekly post by David Hewson, Louise Penny, or the other best-selling authors who jumped in? And I had personal friends I wanted to support or whose small essays pleased me. And when I began my own, I was honored that some people bookmarked mine, and subscribed to the automatic feeds. But suddenly, I was drowning in clever essays. I couldn’t stay current with everybody and vines began to cover the unused links.

One innovation helped a lot: the group blog: The Kill Zone, Jungle Red Writers, Murderati, Pens Fatales…the list is long, and the quality of the writing sparkles. I blushed with pride when The LadyKillers invited me into their highly-rated group. One benefit: with so many writers in one blog, you didn’t have to produce as often as for your own blog. A nice feature, except that I – like many – still produce my own weekly blog.

I’m not answering the blog question in the negative, at least not yet. I enjoy the challenge of coming up with a topic and riffing on it for 300-450 words. I think out loud and solicit readers’ thoughts too. But I do wonder if it falls on deaf ears – or weary eyes, or no eyes at all some weeks.

And the original purpose? I hear from other authors that publishers who used to do a little publicity now do none, that the existence of author-originated strategies is now damn near all there is until and unless you hit “the numbers,” a mysterious goal that the publishers don’t actually share with you. So, onward and outward, reporting live from Blog Central.

Not many people write letters these days. Invitations, thank yous, birthdays, customer service complaints…there are email forms and clever software apps for just about everything. Just ask the Post Office, which is staring some form of bankruptcy in the face. It’s even easier to send an email than to call, witness the phone companies sweating bullets competing for my dwindling landline bill while Apple smiles at my (late adopter) embrace of texting and Facebook continues to “improve” everyone’s access to my social networking information.

So it is a joy to have one friend who not only writes letters, but writes them so brilliantly, so charmingly, so richly that I can hardly wait for her next missive. She’s an American but lives in France, so we do our correspondence via emails, but not in email language. No LOLs or IMHOs for her. She’s literate, funny, frank, and highly opinionated, which I treasure. I try to be half as interesting when I write to her.

Our letters say a lot about us, much as Jane Austen’s and Abigail Adams’ and Lillian Hellman’s did about them. I mention these women not because I equate my writing with theirs, but because, as famous writers and personalities, their epistolary (now there’s a word we don’t use much any more!) writing has been captured, saved, and published, so I can access it. My friend is an artist and writer, and once edited a fashionable magazine, so she has the chops for this. She, like I, stretches her humorous anecdotes to capture the full human folly in them, and holds up a gleaming mirror to her own shortcomings so that I continue to know her as a fully-formed person. I hear her voice and understand that she spends a little time on her letters to me, not so much that her prose is stilted, but enough so it stands for something.

I’m not writing this to bemoan the lack of letter writing skills in “today’s youth.” I suspect every age feels that way about the one that is rapidly succeeding it. I do think something is lost, not just for the reader, but for the writer, when an animated card accompanied by elevator music substitutes for a handwritten birthday note. I’ll bet my grandmother had exactly the same response when a Hallmark card took the note’s place, and somewhere in the 19^th century, someone kvetched when a reference in Latin fell on uncomprehending ears! We are of our era, and I will rejoice and be happy that my friend and I have this small pleasure to relish.