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.

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.

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!

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!

Yikes – Friday again, so soon?

Major manuscript revision in process. Article to write on assignment. Blog post for LadyKillers a couple of days ago. Committee reports for a non-profit board I sit on.

It seems that I’m sitting at the keyboard all day. Just ask the little orange cat begging me to throw her mouse across the room just once more. This is good for a writer, but I lost track of time and my Friday post was the casualty. Rather than write something careless, I’m re-posting an old LadyKillers bit that still holds true: LOCATIONS

Well-crafted settings for stories are like characters in the narrative. They drive action, provide context, set up or resolve conflicts, add color or texture. Writers who skimp on making the location vivid and exciting, stark or serene, dangerous or comforting, have missed a large measure of what most readers want in our stories. Here’s a partial list of some of my favorites in fiction, stories that are memorable to me in part because of the setting. Just thinking about these books floods my senses! What would you add?

Bath, England in PERSUASION by Jane Austen

Communist Laos in THE CORONER’S LUNCH, by Colin Cotterill

Heaven in SUM, by neuroscientist David Eagleman

India in THE GAME, by Laurie King

Lake Superior in A SUPERIOR DEATH by Nevada Barr

Moscow in WAR AND PEACE by Tolstoy

Northern Africa in THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles

Occupied France in SUITE FRANCAISE by Irene Nemirovsky

Paris in MURDER IN THE SENTIER by Cara Black

Post World War I England in MAISIE DOBBS by Jackie Winspear

Shanghai in SHANGHAIED by Eric Stone

Sicily in THE SMELL OF THE NIGHT by Andrea Camilleri

The high seas in MASTER AND COMMANDER by Patrick O’Brian

Victorian London in BLEAK HOUSE by Charles Dickens

LadyKillers have been discussing this all week on our blog site. I’m not on the rotation for the week, so I don’t get a chance to weigh in over there. But the terrific nominations from the other writers got me going and I herewith offer a few of my own. For me, the opening lines need to signal the presence of a good storyteller, someone who is saying, “Draw up your chair to the fire, and let me tell you the marvelous tale…”

In the crime fiction genre, it has recently become a truism that you have to start with a dead body, or at least a shock that pulls the reader into the book forcefully. There are books that do that well, and I relish them. Others, not so much, especially when they’re too obviously manipulative and formulaic. I’ve always been willing to give the writer a little more time as long as I get the sense I’m in the presence of a master who will entice me in rather than yank me by the scruff of my neck.

Not all the best stories are fiction either. As I was searching out favorites that other bloggers hadn’t mentioned, I remembered first lines of poems, histories, social commentaries. All had that power to draw me in, to capture my attention with something clear and yet challenging. Some that I love were far too long to add here, or required that the reader stay with the writer a couple more lines to become fully caught up in the story. I honor them even if I can’t include them here.

• In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The Oxford Bible
• Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droughte of March hath perced to the roote… Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Prologue
• It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• There are people who can be happy anywhere. I am not one of them. – Cornelia Read, A Field of Darkness
• Michael Deramo straightened his tie in front of his cracked hallway mirror and tried to imagine how many buckets it would take to hold one hundred thousand dollars.  – Camille Minichino, The Lithium Murder
• This story’s about greed, desire, love, and death – in the world of antiques you get them all.  – Jonathan Gash, The Judas Pair
• If If you had happened to find yourself on the banks of the Ohio River on a particular afternoon in the spring of 1806 – somewhere just to the north of Wheeling, West Virginia, say – you would probably have noticed a strange makeshift craft drifting lazily down the river. – Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

Would love to hear yours!

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?

I’m a little distracted by the world today.

I don’t like the politics, the economics, the suffering and fighting, damn near anything. That ought to make it a good day to write crime fiction. There are so many villains and victims and crimes and nasty situations to choose from.

But for me at least it doesn’t work that way. I’ve always said that a slight to my beloved is what gave me the core of the story and one of the chief characters in MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT. In the sequel, THE KING’S JAR, it was a glimpse into a research world unlike what I’d known previously that led to the central idea for that Dani novel. At the moment, I’m deep into the third in the same series, MIXED UP WITH MURDER, and Dani is doing some due diligence as a consultant on a college campus, a type of community I know well.

I look at crimes close up, basically as failures of character. I can explore evil or moral sickness on that individual level and understand, sometimes even sympathize a little, with it. But the big stuff? Whole cultures of corruption? The rule of law crumbling in entire countries or regions? Mobs stoning teenagers? Soldiers raping and pillaging on a daily basis? When it gets that big in scale, I can’t decipher the qualities that lead people to carry out such crimes. Is it merely a multiple of individual defects of character or madness, or is it something new, a kind of sickness that only infects people when they’re part of a group all of whom have their own weak spots that somehow get exploited at the same time by the same trigger?

Whatever it is, I’m baffled, occasionally speechless, and definitely not up to the challenge of getting it down on paper. John Le Carre was able to do it for Cold War spy agencies, I think, and Dennis Lehane can paint scary portraits of communities that are – and are subject to – prejudice. Lehane and the other writers on “The Wire” did it every week, but they chose to do it the only way I could conceive of the job, come to think of it, through individual stories that sometimes broke your heart.

All of us who write fictionabout crime have to look it in the face, try to parse it enough to understand it, to see through the shock and tragedy of the act into the hearts of the villains as well as the victims. I’m just having a hard time today seeing past the immensity of the real world crimes.