Having been part of several Sisters in Crime panels recently, I’ve heard some good questions about writing. I’ve picked four to answer on my blog, one a week. If you’re a writer, feel free to add your own thoughts. If you’re a reader, you can ask a new question.

This week:      What’s the strangest experience you’ve had while researching a book?

Week 2:           What do you read while you’re writing, and why?

Week 3:           What comes first, the plot or the characters?

Week 4:           Is being a published author all you thought it would be?

What’s the strangest experience you’ve had while researching a book?

Not sure if “strange” is precisely how I’d label this, but I did have a scare recently, after I had finished THE KING’S JAR and sent it to my agent. In the book, an exceedingly rare Chinese jar from the 12^th century is stolen right before Dani O’Rourke’s museum is about to receive it from the billionaire who bought it many years earlier. The jar’s archeological value lies in the depiction of a rhinoceros on the lid, its single long horn intact and signaling that it was a white rhino, now almost extinct but once reasonably common in the area of Africa where the jar was found buried. Because there were no rhinos in Asia, my scientist blithely explained, he was able to make certain assertions about the trade prominence of the 12^th century African civilization that built the ancient city being excavated.

I had researched my premise, checked with a sub-Saharan history expert, visited museums that had similar jars (with dragons and lions but no rhinos, of course), and felt I was on sure ground. Imagine my shock when I opened a magazine from the Asian Art Museum and saw a color photo of a ceramic rhino crafted in China about 1100 A.D., hornless, but still. What? Were there rhinos in China and I hadn’t known? Feeling like an idiot, I leapt from my chair, dashed to the computer, sure I had messed up terribly.

Whew. There were rhinos in Asia, two kinds, but they had only short, quite stubby horns, not even worth the name. In Africa, the black rhino, still in reasonable supply, has two horns. And the white rhino is, to my enormous relief, the only one with a long, single, distinctive horn. And it lived – and has mostly died, in part because some people believe the horn is a powerful medicine – only in this area of Africa.

Research is a tricky, slippery, scary thing.

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)?

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!

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!

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.

I posted this over at LadyKillers this week and it sparked some great ideas – what do readers think the novel will look like 2, 20, or 200 years from now?

The Future Shape of Novels?

• Strictly 140-character chapters.
• Based on cartoon characters who ran for office in last election.
• Includes interactive graphics.
• Features short 3-D movies.
• Optional music.
• Optional out-loud reading of novel by Angelina Jolie (or, Brad Pitt. Your choice, but not cheap.)
• Customized with your name as protagonist. Or superhero, if appropriate.
• Streamed to your e-reader by Apple or Amazon, the only providers in business.
• Only 99 cents.
• Written by one of 10 best-selling We-Customize-for-U Authors.
• Comes with coupon: Buy 10 and get a free 32-ounce drink.

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.