Behind the Book Archives

Behind the Book by Darynda Jones

by Darynda Jones

When I decided to make my grim reaper female in First Grave on the Right, I really didn’t want a being made of death and darkness and skeletal remains, so I decided to challenge lore. I mean, what if grim reapers were just misunderstood? Represented in legends and mythology erroneously? And what it they were really bright, shiny beacons of light that lured those departed who were stuck on Earth toward them to cross to the other side? Of course, my heroine would attract all kinds of trouble in the process, everything from demons who try to kill her to ghosts who try to kill her to, well, humans who try to kill her.

That is Charlotte “Charley” Davidson in a nutshell. And while she’d like to believe she’s a complete badass, she’s really more of an accident-prone, slightly schizophrenic girl from Albuquerque who takes the complications of ADD to a whole new level. And being the only grim reaper this side of forever doesn’t help.

Okay, but why the grim reaper, you might ask. That one is simple. As an aspiring author, I wanted to get noticed. I wanted something different that would pique the interest of agents and editors alike. Fortunately for me, Charley did just that. First, she won the 2009 RWA® Golden Heart© for Best Paranormal Romance, then she landed me an amazing agent. Not long after that, she secured a three-book deal for the rights to her story with St. Martin’s Press. Her journey has been an incredible one and the fun is just beginning.

For me, that Golden Heart final changed everything. Admittedly, I’d been entering the contest for several years, and while I never finaled despite some pretty good scores, every year I really thought I had a chance. Until 2009. I signed up to enter First Grave on the Right for one reason and one reason only: I wanted to force myself to finish the manuscript. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt it would not final. No way. No how. And then I was mad that I’d wasted the entry fee. That money could have been used for something worthwhile, like chocolate! But I grudgingly sent it in and dismissed it from my mind entirely.

So when March 25 rolled around and I received the call that I was a finalist, to say that I was in a state of shock would be an understatement. I honestly could not believe it. And when I won? Forget about it. I was so shocked, I forgot my shoes and walked to the stage in a daze barefoot.

In First Grave on the Right, Charley Davidson uses her reaper abilities to help her succeed as a private investigator. It’s a natural progression from her childhood. Since she was five, she’s been helping her detective father solve crimes. In First Grave, three lawyers from the same law firm are murdered, and they come to Charley to find their killer. At the same time, she's dealing with a being she calls the Big Bad. He’s more powerful, and definitely sexier, than any specter she's ever come across. With the help of some living and some not-so-living associates, Charley sets out to solve the highest profile case of the year and discovers that dodging bullets isn't nearly as dangerous as falling in love.

Darynda Jones lives in New Mexico, where she is currently hard at work on the third Charley Davidson mystery.

Memoir

Memoir

An author revisits her former flames

Behind the Book by Susan Shapiro

by Susan Shapiro

About to turn 40 years old, I was having a serious midlife crisis. A novel I’d spent five years working on had been rejected, at the same time that my husband “Aaron” and I were going through infertility. I nicknamed this sad, vulnerable time-stretch my “no book, no baby summer.” Then I picked up the phone to hear the voice of Brad, an old college beau I hadn’t spoken to in a decade. He was currently a Harvard science professor with a 24-year-old graduate school girlfriend he could have 20 kids with. Worse, he had a new book coming out. Why did Brad get a book? He was a biology major. I’d been a struggling freelance writer in Manhattan for 20 years. I was enraged.

Instead of killing him, I offered to write a profile of Brad, turning my anxiety into a business opportunity. At our emotional lunch interview, I found myself less interested in his sociobiology book than with what had really happened between us in Ann Arbor, 20 years before. Without realizing it, I’d wound up conducting an exit interview. Focusing on my previous rejection took my mind off my current rejection. It was wildly cathartic. When two other exes called out of the blue, I got together with them and asked them the same questions. Before I married, from the ages of 13 to 35, I’d been madly in love five times, once every 4.4 years. I’d created a mythology in my head about why each of my old loves hadn’t lasted. One guy was a skirt chaser, another was too immature, a third had fallen for a more petite, successful woman. For each breakup, I’d blamed them. Now that I was a happily married, 40-year-old graduate of a dozen years of psychotherapy, my perspective had changed. Instead of being the victim, I pinpointed the moment where I’d screwed up each relationship. Having written countless personal essays on male-to-female issues for The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Jane and New Woman, I suspected I was onto something. I scrawled down what happened when I’d reconnected with each beau and brought the early version into my writing workshop. The group’s members were usually critical about my rough drafts, offering such comments as, “That’s throat clearing. Throw out the first five pages and start over.” This time somebody said, “You should have gotten old and bitter a long time ago, ’cause this rocks.” Giving a reading at NYU, where I taught journalism, I nervously read the first chapter. When I was done, the audience roared. Then all the female undergraduates in the room mobbed me, telling me about their romantic disappointments. I realized what the next step was. I tracked down my other two major heartbreaks. My husband Aaron, a TV comedy writer, always hated when I wrote anything about him or our marriage. It was a problem since I preferred writing in first person and hated censoring myself. But here I could write about sex, drugs and rock and roll in past tense, so he couldn’t complain. There was only one problem. The workshop insisted that the tiny role of the muttering husband in the background be expanded. It seemed that the book I was writing in order not to write about my husband needed him as the hero. I feared the minute he read it, he’d divorce me.

The day after a wonderful editor at Delacorte bought my finished manuscript, I handed it to Aaron. He loved it, though he later joked to a friend that he was penning a rebuttal called The Bitch Beside Me. When I e-mailed Brad that I sold the book, he asked if he could see it. After he read it, his response was, “You’ve written a better character than I am a person.” The only people who don’t like it so far are my parents in Michigan. My mother said, “Go ahead, tell the whole world you’re in therapy.” My father is threatening to move to Alaska and keeps telling me how the sculpture of five male heads on the cover makes it seem like I cut the heads off. I told them that one of the benefits of publishing a book at my age is that I don’t really care if it’s not their cup of tea; they’re not my audience. “If you think turning 40 was hard, wait until you turn 50,” an older colleague recently warned.

Since I had the most fruitful midlife crisis in the history of the world, I can’t wait. Susan Shapiro’s heartbreaking and hilarious memoir, Five Men Who Broke My Heart, investigates the current lives of her past loves. A freelance writer, Shapiro lives in Manhattan with her husband.

About to turn 40 years old, I was having a serious midlife crisis. A novel I'd spent five years working on had been rejected, at the same time that my husband "Aaron" and I were going through infertility. I nicknamed this sad, vulnerable time-stretch my…

Fiction

Fiction

Threads of a mother’s memories weave the fabric of a debut novel

Behind the Book by Brett Ellen Block

by Brett Ellen Block

Some writers have always known they wanted be writers. Others have felt a calling to the profession. I, however, fell into fiction writing literally. After slipping and twisting my ankle my second year at college, I needed to find a class I could get to easily on crutches. It was late in the registration period, and I was left with a choice between only two courses: Descartesian Theory and Creative Writing. I might have been clumsy, but I wasn't stupid. I chose the writing class.

Years later, with two master's degrees in the subject behind me, I found myself at an impasse. I'd finished my first book, a collection of short stories called Destination Known, and was ready to write a novel, but needed funding to make that possible. Uncoordinated or not, I wasn't likely to trip into any mounds of cash on the street. Then a classmate of mine from the Iowa Writers' Workshop told me about a fellowship offered to alumni and suggested I apply. It seemed like I had fallen into some luck without actually having to fall. My decision to apply only started to feel like a misstep once I faced the task of beginning the book. Up until that point, I'd only written short fiction, and the prospect of embarking on a novel, even a portion of one to submit for the fellowship, was daunting. In spite of all my writing experience, I genuinely had no clue where to begin.

I tried hitting up friends for family stories, plumbing my own past, even chatting up strangers, but nothing piqued my interest. One night, while complaining to my mother about the glare from my blank computer screen, I happened to ask if she remembered any striking or odd stories from her youth. She mulled it over for a bit, then told me that she recalled the rumor of a priest who'd been buried in a potter's field, but no one would ever say why. The forbidden quality of the secret surrounding the priest intrigued me. I tried to imagine what he could have done that would prohibit him from being buried in consecrated ground, and that was where the root of the story took hold.

The setting for my novel, The Grave of God's Daughter, is based on the place where my mother was raised. All throughout my childhood, we had made trips to her hometown in Western Pennsylvania, and to a young girl, it was like a foreign land that was just a car ride away. I remembered eavesdropping on people as they spoke in Polish, and attending mass at Saint Joseph's Church, the foundation of which my great-grandmother had actually helped dig. Some of the streets were still cobblestone, and there was an enormous neon cross perched on the mountain on the other side of the river that glowed through the night. I'd grown up hearing the tales my mother told about collecting glass bottles to make change, the strict nuns who were her teachers in school and how she'd never seen a mosquito while growing up because of the chemical plant on the other side of town.

While thinking out the novel, those stories began to blend with my own memories. One in particular was the time I visited my great-uncle's house, where he raised pit bulls. The sound of more than two dozen dogs barking was as frightening for me as a child as it became for the narrator of the novel. Though the fabric of The Grave of God's Daughter has many threads of fact, they are only the framework for a story about the unwavering bond between mother and child. Given the source of the story, the theme couldn't be more apt.

If I had a dime for all of the times I'd heard the phrase "write what you know" in creative writing classes, I might not have needed the fellowship grant, but I also might not have written this book. I couldn't have predicted that when I injured my ankle I would stumble onto a career that I love, nor could I have planned that the inspiration for this novel would be a strange scrap of memory from my mother's childhood, but like any good story, even the one behind the novel has plenty of twists and turns.

Brett Ellen Block's debut novel, The Grave of God's Daughter, explores a young girl's coming-of-age in an isolated small town that is keeping a terrible secret. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Block now lives in Los Angeles.

Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense

Finding inspiration for a No. 1 series

Behind the Book by Alexander McCall Smith

by Alexander McCall Smith

Where do the people in books come from? Authors are often asked this question, and they often find difficulty in answering. As the author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of novels, I am often asked how it is that I have ended up writing about a woman who lives far away in Botswana, when I am a man living at the other end of the world. This strikes people as rather strange, and I suppose that in a sense it is.

I decided to write about a woman from Botswana some years ago, when I witnessed the remarkable sight of a woman chasing a chicken about the yard in a Botswana village. The chicken came off second best, and was duly dispatched to provide the next day's lunch. But what remained in my mind was the cheerfulness of the woman who performed this rather everyday task. And I thought that one day, I might write about a woman who was competent and resourceful and who was born in that particular village.

Years passed before I sat down to write a story about just such a woman. My wife and I were spending some time in the south of France. I sat down at the desk in the house in which we were staying and wrote a short story about a woman called Precious Ramotswe, who inherits cattle from her father and sells them. She decides to set up a small detective agency with the proceeds, rather than to establish a more mundane and safer business. I enjoyed writing this short story, and I found that I liked the character I had created. At the end of the story, it occurred to me that I should write further stories about this woman, and I did so. These became a book and the book became a series. These books then completely changed my life.

I had not intended to write a mystery series, and indeed there is comparatively little mystery in these books. They are really the story of one woman, Precious Ramotswe, and of those who play a part in her life her fiance, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni; her assistant, Mma. Makutsi; and her friend, the matron of an orphan farm, Mma. Potokwani. They are the sorts of people who might escape notice, except for one thing: they are all, in their various ways, good people.

I decided to write books about good people for a set of very particular reasons. I think that there are so many books which stress the dysfunctional in life, that deal with conflict and tragedy. In my books, everybody behaves rather well towards one another. They are polite people they use courteous language, they understand and forgive, they are kind. And why not? Why should we not have books about people like that? People have said to me that I am a Utopian novelist. Some people suggest that there cannot be people like this, that Precious Ramotswe cannot exist. I disagree! Botswana is a remarkable country which has made a great success of itself. It is has shown that countries in Africa can be well run and prosperous. And what is more, there are plenty of people in African countries who are leading profoundly decent lives, often in conditions of some difficulty. I hope that my books show that this is all possible. And if these books are, as some people have suggested, a love letter to a country, then I am proud to sign my name to that love letter.

The fifth book in the series, The Full Cupboard of Life, has just been published in the United States. I have finished work on the manuscript of the sixth, which will be published next year. With each visit I make to the world of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, the more I become attached to the characters and involved in their lives. They are very real to me, as I suppose must be inevitable if one is writing a series of this nature. So I hear their voices. Mma. Ramotswe, too, is at my elbow, giving me occasional pieces of advice. And if she were to walk in the door tomorrow, I know that we would sit down together and have a cup of her favorite bush tea. And then we might go for a walk, and look out over that landscape that she loves so much, with its wide plains and its thorn trees, and its great, echoing empty sky.

Alexander McCall Smith was born in Africa and currently lives in Scotland, where he teaches medical law at Edinburgh University. His latest book is The Full Cupboard of Life, the fifth installment in the best-selling No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Behind the Book: Pyramid scheme

Behind the Book by Arthur Phillips

by Arthur Phillips

Arthur Phillips' critically acclaimed debut, Prague, was a bestseller in 2002. His inventive second novel, The Egyptologist, takes readers into the competitive world of post-World War I Egyptology, where a glory-seeking young archeologist bets his career and his fiancée's fortune on the discovery of the tomb of an apocryphal pharaoh. Phillips, who studied at Harvard and is a five-time "Jeopardy!" champion, explains here what prompted his interest in this unusual subject. We'll leave it to readers to decide just how much to believe.

Readers often challenge authors to identify the myriad streamlets that flowed together to form the river of a novel: How did you think of that? How much is true? How did you research it? To the best of my recollection, here are the tributary events that led to The Egyptologist.

Several years ago, I was at a Kinko's in Sink, Oklahoma, bored, photocopying my remarks for The Sink Literary Festival's panel on The Self in Flight from Itself: Understanding the Author as Pathological Liar when, in the blue recycling bin at my feet, I noticed the distinct first page of a handwritten letter. Despite the poor toner quality, I could make out a date from 1952 and a series of lovelorn complaints. The writer accused Beloved, hated Doris of any number of violations of his love. Oddly, among the other crimes, the writer's wrath was most righteous over a betrayal of some obscure academic debate: But, Doris, your decision to side with the know-nothings of Egyptology in denying the historical veracity of King Atum-hadu has wounded me more than all your petty cruelty, your crude tauntings, your low-cut End of page, and none beneath it. I didn't know anything about Egyptology (I still don't) but the idea of a lover enraged over such a dusty topic caught me.

I certainly didn't have a novel, just a sniff of something, and I didn't smell it again for two years until, at a museum in Thailand, battling the heat and jet lag while walking through an exhibit on the 18th-century Siamese Queen Shlipralithpur, I was bored again. I noticed four young women speaking a Slavic language, maybe Polish. I recognized only two accented words: Shlipralithpur and Atum-hadu. The coincidence awoke me, and I recalled Doris' love-shattering controversial position. What possible relationship could that ancient king have to this opium-gobbling girl-queen of Siam or to these sun-burnt Slavic beauties (who spoke not one word in common with any language I could sputter, but one of whom, when I repeated Atum-hadu, smiled broadly and slowly drew in my notebook a series of the most exquisitely vulgar hieroglyphs)? I was hooked; I smelled the simmering stock of a novel. The process of inspiration is impenetrable, at least at the time, but I remember that I was fiercely determined (in a way I rarely am, as laziness is my ruling humor) to learn about Atum-hadu.

My research took a year. The only public documents even mentioning Atum-hadu were located in the People's Library of Ancient Cultures, a squat 1970s concrete lump in a Beijing neighborhood split between lesser university disciplines and adult-video importers. It took some finagling, but I was permitted a scant 90 minutes of supervised access to the archives. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I found it at minute 86: the same series of obscene hieroglyphs I had last seen 13 months earlier in Bangkok. I began feverishly copying everything, though of course I couldn't understand the symbols. I managed to scribble only one paragraph in my four minutes. And then the document was snatched away.

Home a week later, I went in search of an Egyptologist to translate the paragraph for me. A cosmic sigh: the very first Egypt scholar I found at my local community college was a young, sun-burnt Russian emigre named Doris. Her translation:

The invaders cut through Atum-hadu's defenders. Their faces spattered with the blood of a decade's slaughter, their howls ringing out as they reached at last for their prize, maddened by their strict diet of war, promised blinding plunder and terrified victims, they poured into Atum-hadu's court. There they gaped at the defiantly exuberant courtiers of Atum-hadu: feasting, dancing to the intricate music of their king's composition, riding trained camels and, along the defenses, on the floors, and on tables engaging one another in combinations and postures the invaders could never have conceived of, even after a decade of desert isolation where their thoughts had nowhere to turn but upon the faraway pleasures of the flesh.

Doris read the translation to me in her lilting accent as a dusty sunbeam alit on her face, and soon after I began work on the novel which is now The Egyptologist.

Arthur Phillips' critically acclaimed debut, Prague, was a bestseller in 2002. His inventive second novel, The Egyptologist, takes readers into the competitive world of post-World War I Egyptology, where a glory-seeking young archeologist bets his career and his fiancée's fortune on the discovery of the…

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Keeping the Covenant: a beloved fantasy series resumes

Behind the Book by Stephen R. Donaldson

by Stephen R. Donaldson

Stephen R. Donaldson began his acclaimed Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series in 1977. With his creation of Thomas, a flawed everyman who enters an alternate universe, the Land, to save it from the evil Lord Foul, Donaldson became one of the biggest names in fantasy. He ended the series with White Gold Wielder, much to the dismay of his millions of fans. This month, Donaldson launches a four-volume conclusion to the saga with The Runes of the Earth. Here, Donaldson explains why he decided to return to Thomas and the Land after more than 20 years.

The dedication to my novel, The Wounded Land (Book One of The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant), reads: "To Lester del Rey: Lester made me do it." I naturally wanted to dedicate a book to him. He was the editor who discovered me, the editor who found Lord Foul’s Bane in his slush pile and decided to publish it when it had already been rejected by every fiction publisher in the U.S. (including Ballantine Books, the company that later hired him to start a new fantasy line). I needed to express my gratitude somehow. And I chose to say that "Lester made me do it" an intentional reference to that old excuse, "The Devil made me do it" because he is both directly and indirectly responsible for every Covenant book that has followed, and will follow in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

Of course, Lester is directly responsible because he published me when no one else would. In that sense, he is responsible for my entire writing career (19 books so far, not counting The Runes of the Earth). Nonetheless the line, "Lester made me do it," refers more to his indirect responsibility for the subsequent Covenant books.

Lester, bless him, had many admirable qualities as an editor. However, he was also one of publishing’s foremost advocates for "repeatable success." Having published my first trilogy successfully, he saw no earthly reason why I should not continue to write Covenant books, and only Covenant books, until the day I died (or until they stopped selling, whichever came first). I, on the other hand, disagreed. Strenuously. As far as I was concerned, my first trilogy told a complete story, and I saw no earthly reason why I should ever write another Covenant book. I had nothing more to say on the subject of Thomas Covenant’s struggles against Despite in the arena of the Land.

Well, Lester didn’t get where he was in life by taking "no" for an answer. But he had already discovered that I can be a bit pig-headed where writing is concerned. So he cleverly didn’t try to argue with me. Instead he began sending me "ideas" for my next Covenant book. Idea after idea, relentlessly, until I feared that he would never stop. And each new idea was worse than the one before. Soon he was sending me ideas so bad that Bulwar-Lytton wouldn’t have written them. And at last he succeeded in his devilish purpose: he sent me an idea SO bad that before I could stop myself I began thinking, "No, this one is truly terrible. What I really ought to do instead is . . ." Almost instantaneously, my brain seemed to fill with fire. Mere moments later, in a mad rush, almost helplessly, I had sketched in the main stories for both The Second Chronicles and The Last Chronicles: both of them perfectly logical extensions of "Covenant’s struggles against Despite in the arena of the Land"; both of them building seamlessly in sequence on the first Covenant trilogy; both of them playing their parts to make the entire Covenant saga into one vast, organic whole.

More than 20 years may have passed since I completed The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, but The Last Chronicles has remained alive in my imagination the whole time, waiting more and more impatiently for me to get around to finishing what I started. In that sense, it is quite literally true that "Lester made me do it."

American History, History

History American History

Behind the Book: In telling the story of an American hero, finding his own

Behind the Book by Robert Coram

by Robert Coram

It took me some 50 years to appreciate Veterans Day, and that appreciation came when I began writing military biographies.

I grew up the firstborn son of a man who spent 33 years in the Army. After he retired, he was known in my hometown as “the Sarge,” and that was the way he wanted it. I missed childhood; instead I had a rather extended boot camp and I rebelled against everything the Sarge tried to teach me about the military.

The Sarge died when I was 16 and I did not mourn his passing. I flunked out of college and, for reasons I never understood, joined the Air Force. After facing three courts martial, I was kicked out of the Air Force and for the next 50 years I stayed as far as possible from everything to do with the military.

As a newspaper reporter I received two Pulitzer nominations. As a freelancer I wrote for most national magazines, including the New Yorker. I taught writing for 12 years at Emory. I wrote seven novels and three nonfiction books.

But my spirit was restless and my soul was unfulfilled.

Through a strange series of events I came to write Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. There was nothing in my professional background to indicate that I could write the sort of book that Boyd became. During the research about the life of this extraordinary man, I had intimations of what the Sarge had tried to teach me. But I pushed those feelings aside.

Success of the Boyd book was such that my publisher, Little, Brown and Company, gave me a two-book contract and stipulated that each book be a military biography. During the writing of the first book in the new contract, American Patriot: The Life and Wars of Colonel Bud Day, I finally understood; I got it, I knew with blinding clarity what it was the Sarge had tried to teach me so long ago. And I wept with the knowledge that I had rejected perhaps the most priceless gift a father can give to his son.

The understanding came when I was writing a scene involving a prolonged and particularly brutal torture session suffered by Colonel Day when he was a POW during the Vietnam War. He would have died—and almost did—before he violated the Code of Conduct that governed the behavior of POWs. He would return home with honor, or he would not return at all. Bud Day showed me, by his example, there are things worth dying for. Through him I understood commitment to duty, and honor, and what it means to be a man of character. Through him I understood the love of country that is part of the DNA of military people but simply beyond the understanding of most civilians. Colonel Day became in my mind the exemplar for everything that is good and noble about the military, everything the Sarge had tried to teach me.

Even today, I grow teary when I re-read the torture scenes in Colonel Day’s biography.

My next biography, Brute: The Life of Victor Krulak, U.S. Marine, I wrote free of the shackles of the past and in full recognition that I am a troubadour for America’s greatest heroes, the men and women who wear the uniform of this country.

While I admire and respect these men and women, I do my job. I do not write hagiographies. To do so would be an abrogation of the sense of duty I feel about my work; the understanding of which I learned from Colonel Day.

I fly the American flag at my home in Atlanta and at my studio on the Georgia coast. To me, Veterans Day is one of the very special holidays we celebrate. Writing military biographies not only turned my career around, it brought rest to my spirit and fulfillment to my soul.

Today, when I visit my 92-year-old mother in deep southwest Georgia, I always take time to travel up to the little country cemetery where the Sarge is buried. I sit on the side of his grave and I tell him of my work. And I believe, that after all these years, he is now proud of me.

Read an excerpt from Brute on Little, Brown’s website, or find out more about Coram on his website.

Author photo by Billy Howard.

It took me some 50 years to appreciate Veterans Day, and that appreciation came when I began writing military biographies.

I grew up the firstborn son of a man who spent 33 years in the Army. After he retired, he was known in my…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Fiction comes to life on daytime drama

Behind the Book by Michael Malone

by Michael Malone

Hyperion Books first talked with me about writing a novel tied to ABC’s daytime drama “One Life to Live” while I was co-head-writing the show. My first response was no. I didn’t want to do a novelization of the soap opera or a spin-off or a journal. Besides, there was already more than enough fiction for me to imagine in the world of “One Life” itself five hours of drama a week, 52 weeks a year of interlaced, multigenerational plots for a whole town full of people of every social and psychological ilk. That narrative range and abundance of character was what had drawn me, as a novelist, to writing soap opera. I loved its capacious canvas and its generic receptivity. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Hyperion’s suggestion, and about how soap opera might lend itself to the idea not of novelizing the show, but of writing a novel on the show. That was the genesis of The Killing Club.

We would watch a fictional character create a piece of fiction, a mystery novel, as a storyline on “One Life to Live.” We would watch the novel as it was being planned, and as it was written, and read, and finally published. The novel was “written” by Marcie Walsh (wonderfully played by the actress Kathy Briar), a smart, spunky young woman who attended “Llanview University” and worked as the receptionist at the Llanview police station. For her fiction, she drew upon as writers do people and events in her “real” life: the detectives and lawyers with whom she worked and the crimes she saw being investigated around her. As she caught the mystery bug, she read other mysteries (including one of mine) and she tried (sometimes with comic, sometimes with dangerous results) to solve crimes herself. Finally, encouraged by her doctor boyfriend and her crew of college friends, she decided to write her own book. The Killing Club is that novel. The plot evolved from an idea for a movie that my colleague at “One Life,” Josh Griffith, and I had had about a group of misfits in high school who have a club in which they imagine ingenious ways to murder their “enemies.” Then, 10 years later, one of the club members is murdered in just such a bizarre way. Then another club member dies. Then another. Who is killing the Killing Club? And why? On the show, a friend of Marcie’s sent the manuscript to Michael Malone, the novelist, a “professor at Llanview University.” Mr. Malone liked what he saw of Marcie’s book and decided to help her with it and then to find her a publisher. He sent the novel to Hyperion Books. They accepted it. Excitedly Marcie traveled to New York to meet Gretchen Young, who is the real editor of the real book, just as Chip Kidd, whom she was also thrilled to meet, is the real cover designer. The Killing Club was “published” on the show at the same time that it was published in “real life” mid-February. In the future, mysterious goings-on will happen in Marcie’s life that eerily reflect the plot of the novel. The creation of the novel, The Killing Club, over the past year on “One Life” has been, then, the creation of a fiction about a fiction inside a fiction. But it is also a “real” novel. In that regard, for me the challenge was, as always, the narrative voice. What sort of narrator would Marcie Walsh “create”? The voice turned out to be that of Jamie Ferrara, a young wisecracking homicide detective in the small town of Gloria, New Jersey, the working-class daughter of an Italian-American cop, and herself one of the founders of the Killing Club.

People ask me, is this a Marcie Walsh book or a Michael Malone book? I would answer that my books are Michael Malone books, but each evolves from the characters who inhabit it. The minute I hear the voice of a narrator, from word one of page one of a story, I am listening to that character’s voice. The narrator of Handling Sin is very different from that of The Last Noel, and Jamie Ferrara is very different from the Southern detective Cuddy Mangum in my Hillston novels. But they are all, I trust, equally at home in the landscape of my fiction.

Acclaimed novelist Michael Malone published his first book in 1975 and went on to write such Southern comic classics as Handling Sin. He has also written extensively for television, including two stints as head writer for the soap opera “One Life to Live.” In his latest book, The Killing Club, Malone combines both careers with fascinating and spine-tingling results.

Hyperion Books first talked with me about writing a novel tied to ABC's daytime drama "One Life to Live" while I was co-head-writing the show. My first response was no. I didn't want to do a novelization of the soap opera or a spin-off or…

Self-Help

Self-Help

Realizing a sister’s vision

Behind the Book by Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas

by Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas

Realizing a sister’s vision Our sister, Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas, passionately pursued a dream: the creation of a book called You Can Do It!.

The book was a distillation of the way she lived her life with creativity, courage, and an infectious exuberance and the way she hoped to spread the words of the book’s title to other women. Her message is best summed up by a line from the movie The Shawshank Redemption, a quote she stuck on her fridge: Get busy living or get busy dying. The quote is especially poignant because we lost Lauren, a passenger on United Flight 93, on September 11, 2001.

But while tragedy ended her life, it far from defined it. The Lauren working on You Can Do It! was a woman in her mid-30s who loved learning, having new experiences and facing down fears. A married career woman, she knew that daily to-do lists made it next to impossible for women to think about, let alone get around to doing, the things on their want-to-do lists. But she also knew how wonderful she felt when she made the time to dream and dare and do the things on her own such list, and she felt she had a surefire way to invite other women to experience the thrill of accomplishment.

Lauren was inspired by the concept of Girl Scout badges. She envisioned a book that would offer a tantalizing menu of the kinds of things women so often say they’re too busy, tired or afraid to try, broken down into fun and doable steps and capped at the finish line with a tangible, ta-da reward: a badge.

Lauren bubbled with excitement when she talked about her dream book and in her can-do style, she took it very seriously, going so far as to quit her job to work full-time toward its publication.

So after Lauren’s death, even in the midst of shock and grief, we wondered, what about Lauren’s book? We knew nothing about book publishing, had resolved as a family to keep our grief private and were extremely wary of anyone exploiting Lauren’s life story in any way. But the book had meant the world to Lauren. Was there a way for us to finish what she had started? We made contact with Caroline Herter, the independent book producer Lauren had teamed up with. Slowly and carefully, we all moved forward, spending more than two years creating the 500-page book covering activities from acting to activism, surfing to singing, growing a garden to growing a business. Lauren’s vision was realized in 60 chapters, complete with full-color, peel-and-stick badges. To make it a true women-helping-women book, accomplished women in many fields provided real-world mentoring. These busy women (including the executive editor of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine, the leader of the first women’s ascent of Annapurna, and the founder of Shepherd’s Garden Seeds catalog) gave a first glimpse of how the book would be embraced by donating their time and talents.

The resulting book is exactly what Lauren imagined. Practical and inspiring, it’s a bit like a great cookbook. You pick it up thinking that you are looking for one thing and wind up finding 20 other things you can’t wait to try! Every step of the way, we have tried to be Lauren’s eyes and ears, and now, her voice. This isn’t always easy. Doing this on Lauren’s behalf (and on behalf of the Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas Foundation, where a portion of proceeds from the book will go) feels right, but there’s no way around it: on some days the deep sorrow that Lauren isn’t doing this comes to the fore. Working side by side, as sisters for our sister is comforting, and we’ve also found that the book has been positive for our whole family. The book is Lauren, and working on it together has, in a very real and meaningful way, kept her close to us.

We remember talking to Lauren about how amazing it would be to someday see two women sitting at a cafÅ½ with a copy of You Can Do It! on the table between them. That’s no longer a dream. Now, women can hear Lauren say, "C’mon! Live the biggest, boldest, best life you can while you can." The publication of You Can Do It! means that Lauren’s dream has finally come true, which doesn’t really surprise us; Lauren always knew we could all do it!

Realizing a sister's vision Our sister, Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas, passionately pursued a dream: the creation of a book called You Can Do It!.

The book was a distillation of the way she lived her life with creativity, courage, and an infectious exuberance and…

Fiction, Short Stories

Fiction Short Stories

The seeds of one writer’s inspiration

Behind the Book by Owen King

by Owen King

Writer Owen King makes his fiction debut this summer with the publication of We're All in This Together, a collection that includes the novella of the title and four short stories. Ranging from serious to hilarious, from blunt to delicate, the volume showcases King's accomplished storytelling style. Here, he reflects on the people and places that have inspired his writing.

I sometimes worry that living in New York City will eventually jade me to eccentricity after all, everyone who lives here, who sleeps behind paper-thin walls, and who packs into the subway and rides ass-to-ass for an hour on a daily basis, has at least contemplated the possibility of descending into some florid, screaming insanity. As a New Yorker, when you see a man with a tie knotted around his head, goose-stepping around and around the statue of Gandhi in Union Square Park, cackling to himself and rapping Havah Nagilah, your best instinct is to keep right on going straight ahead and never look back. If you live in this city long enough, proximity teaches you to cut as wide a berth as possible. One realizes that another refrigerator leak, a few more sleepless nights on account of the stud operation next door, another evaluation without a raise, and that could very easily be you doing the Gandhi circuit.

For better or worse, however, I'm sure that it's no anomaly that as a writer I tend to be inspired by exactly that kind of self-displacement: What was that man doing two years ago? Does someone love him? How long will he keep going? Where does he go when he's finished? Why Gandhi, for God's sake? That is to say, I tend to start with a situation, or even just an image, and then use the story to try to figure it out: how did this happen, who was involved, in what ways did it change them.

For instance, in my new book, the story Wonders germinated from a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote about the great Red Sox outfielder Jim Rice: one game, as a pop fly took Rice to the edge of the stands, a fan reached out, took the hat right off Rice's head and went running. Then, the story went, the entire Red Sox team barreled into the stands to get the hat back. I had no idea if the story was true, but I wanted it to be, and although the scene it inspired turned out to be the end of Wonders, that was how I began.

I like to think that the bucolic hometown of my youth, Bangor, Maine, was rich in the peculiar episodes and individuals that make for promising fiction. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have to concede that by bucolic Maine town standards, my own family is as peculiar as any. My parents, Stephen and Tabitha King, are both authors, and during daylight hours, my father actually dozes in a large, leathery cocoon suspended from the rafters of the barn.*)

We're All In This Together, the novella that accounts for the bulk of my collection, was primarily inspired by my own feelings about the results of the 2000 election—I wasn't happy but the motor of the narrative belongs to the owner of Bangor's only billboard, a roughly 10×10 piece of miter board. This monument near the corner of Union Street and West Broadway stands angled on a brief, privately owned patch of grass in order to, somewhat charmingly and somewhat inexplicably, remind passersby of the seasons.

In the spring, the billboard will usually be covered with something like a rendering of frolicking puppies, along with the legend, SPRING. In the fall, we might get a tow-headed boy chasing a kite through a couple of swirling leaves, and in case that didn't fully explain it, the title FALL. While I've never learned the identity of the seasonal billboard artist, or if he or she means to convey some larger point about the dangers of forgetting the seasons, at some point in 2002, I had a daydream about getting my own billboard and writing down my feelings about the current administration in BIG BLACK LETTERS for everyone in the neighborhood to see. Of course, that was just a daydream; it wasn't something I would actually do. . . . But who would put up a sign that said all the angry things that I and so many people I knew were feeling about the direction of our country? Why would he do it? How would it change him?

The story I wrote ballooned to touch upon subjects ranging from organized labor to softcore television to fathers and stepfathers, but the seed was in that eccentric little billboard near the corner of Union and West Broadway.

* Kidding.

Writer Owen King makes his fiction debut this summer with the publication of We're All in This Together, a collection that includes the novella of the title and four short stories. Ranging from serious to hilarious, from blunt to delicate, the volume showcases King's accomplished…

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

BEHIND THE BOOK: Novelist imagines her ancestors’ westward journey

Behind the Book by Karen Fisher

by Karen Fisher

When I started my first novel, A Sudden Country, in 1990, I thought it would take a year. Through my ancestry, I'd always felt linked to the story of westward migration. But when I was growing up in the 60s, the story of Oregon emigration had faded into a hazy foundational myth: corny or romantic or shameful, depending on your demographic. I knew it had been none of those. It had been a real event in which real people had taken an incredible leap of faith. What had made them leave safe homes for the unknown? What had they found? I could only guess. But just knowing their stories had given me a willingness to take risks and to endure life's inconveniences, to value survival skills.
As a teacher, I took teenagers into the wilderness and saw how many had no idea what humans were capable of. I told stories of explorers and emigrants and Native Americans how they'd lived and what they'd done. These stories had the power to change their outlooks, too. This history seemed too important to forget, to laugh at or dismiss. That's not to say I wasn't uncomfortable with my colonial legacy. My college years had been informed by the new environmental movement, by AIM, by the rage of historical revisionism that cast Americans not as victims or heroes but as monstrous aggressors. But I knew, again, that the people in conflict at the time had seen a much more complex picture, different from any historical recasting.

I never expected to exorcise my conqueror's guilt, but it did seem necessary to understand this story from the ground from inside those who'd been there. So I wrote, and when the year was out, I realized my presumption. Grand intentions had done nothing but produce a fiction, as absurd as any other, and I was expecting a first child. I put the project away, resolved to make better use of my time. Then, with no less presumption, my husband and I quit our jobs and moved to an Idaho farm. With no money or work to fall back on, driving a trailer full of goats and horses, cats and hens, we arrived on 50 acres and soon had to fix tractors, build barns, dig cellars, grow food. What had we been thinking? Six years passed. I had a girl, then a boy. Each winter I tried to write. By then I'd ridden country once mapped by Hudson's Bay fur traders, snowshoed through winters so long and bleak that I'd come to see how color vermilion or a string of beads could become currency. Now a mother, I'd wondered how one eloquent trader had endured a winter in which his whole family died of smallpox. I'd stood on old village sites, pondered churches built by rival missionaries, learned to butcher deer and split cordwood from a Nez Perce neighbor. Summer days of hoeing and diapering had taught me things I'd never guessed about poverty. Each month brought some new lesson, and for a writer, the most important one was this: that facts and ideas were not enough to write from. Only by feeling a life could I understand it. Only by living could I feel it. Then I was given an account handed down by a true ancestor. Emma Mitchell was 11 when she crossed to Oregon in 1847. Desperate toward the journey's end, her family won permission to winter at the Whitman mission. A month later, the Cayuse massacred the mission's American men, took the women and children hostage. From my farm I could almost see that place, but never imagined my connection. Or guessed that but for a pair of stolen stockings, I might well not exist.

To take up those dry husks of words and know a woman who once woke from dreams, pressed her lips to an infant's hair, found her courage, kept a secret; to know a man who had split wood, built barns, lost love to know these things was to know my new ability to speak for those whose lives had been reduced to names in the backs of Bibles, a saved lock of hair, old pages lit to fire kindling. I abandoned years of drafts, everything I'd done, and began again, hoping (with less presumption now), to honor them.

Karen Fisher now lives with her husband and three children on an island in Puget Sound.

Health & Fitness, Lifestyles

Lifestyles Health & Fitness

Let’s get physical

Behind the Book by James McManus

by James McManus

My new book, Physical: An American Checkup, probably sprang from an Abe Lincoln quote I first came across many years ago: I must study the plain, physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible, and learn what appears to be wise and right. And from crazier notions I came up with on my own, such as: The truth is, I don’t think I’m going to die. Not today, not tomorrow, not in 2067. Not me.

As I reached my late 40s, I thought things like that more and more often. In April 2002, a stitch along the left side of my abdomen suddenly graduated into an aching throb. I’d turned 51 in late March and was just beginning to get my feet underneath me again after the death of my son James from a drug overdose. I had tenure as a lit and writing professor, my second marriage was flourishing, and my book about poker (Positively Fifth Street) was scheduled to be published the following March. I felt pretty good about things, as long as you didn’t count the abscess in my soul where my son lived. But within a couple of days the thorn in my side, as I thought of it, had me walking hunched over like a little old man with bad knees and end-stage cirrhosis, not exactly the image I like to project to the world. As the throbbing intensified, I gulped down more Advil and worried.

I’d been taking Zocor to lower my cholesterol for almost two years, this while neglecting to get my liver function tested. Lynn Martin, my primary care physician, had told me to have it checked after three months because the possible side effects of the medicine included nephritis and liver damage, but I somehow forgot. I knew I’d been dosing myself far too liberally with Advil for headaches and hangovers, so my self-diagnosis was liver failure, though the phrase I used with my wife, Jennifer, was some liver thing. It was only at Jennifer’s insistence that I finally made an appointment to have my liver enzymes tested. I also stopped drinking and, in spite of the crippling pain, as I phrased it to myself, stopped taking Advil, even though I understood the damage was already done. Oh, and another thing, Braino, Jennifer said after wishing me luck and dropping me off at the lab. Your liver’s on your right side, not on your left.

The first appointment I could get was with Dr. Martin’s partner, Dennis Hughes. Tallish, maybe 40, all business, Hughes glanced at the blood test results, felt around where I’d told him it hurt, asked a few questions, then told me I probably had diverticulitis. Your liver’s functioning perfectly. Hughes e-mailed scrips for painkillers and antibiotics to my Walgreen’s and recommended a CT scan of my abdomen, which would confirm his diagnosis. The colonoscopy two weeks later will confirm that it’s all healed up nicely. I nodded. Had I missed something? The practice had just been computerized, and Hughes was happy to demonstrate how my records, medications, etc., were all in the system. The referrals for your scan and colonoscopy are already at Evanston Hospital. Terrific. The antibiotics killed the infection, or at least the symptoms, in a couple of days, so I was able to squirrel the unused painkillers into my party stash. When I called to report the good news, a nurse reminded me I still needed to get a colonoscopy. I’ll make the appointment as soon as I hang up, I told her, then sat down to breakfast, all better.

Days went by. Maybe a week. The pain was long gone, and I’d heard all about colonoscopies. You fasted for two or three days while slurping battery acid; step two involved a fully articulated four-foot-long aluminum bullwhip with a search light, a video camera and a lasso at the tip getting launched a few feet up into your large intestine. Not to worry, however. They used really super-duper lubrication. While discussing some unrelated business with Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, I happened to mention my gastrointestinal adventure. Next thing I knew, Lewis was proposing that I go to the Mayo Clinic for what he called their executive physical, then write a big story about it. Now, this was a guy who had already changed my life by sending me to cover the 2000 World Series of Poker, so I had every reason to trust him. Yet the Mayo proposal triggered a whirlwind of panic. Accepting this plummy assignment would more or less guarantee I’d be told things I did not want to hear. The good news, Mr. McManus, is you’ve got almost five weeks to live. The bad news is, we started counting over a month ago. What if the Mayo clinicians discovered a tumor the size of a Titleist wedged inoperably between my pons and my creative left hemisphere? What if as they certainly would they made me swear off alcohol, tasty food and my nightly postprandial Parliament Light? It wasn’t that I didn’t understand how lucky I was to be offered a free Mayo Clinic physical, I just had too many other things on my plate turf and surf, garlic mashed potatoes, baked ziti, the take-out Mekong Fried Pork from the Phat Phuc Noodle Bar. But no! Not only would I have to drink gallons of icky stuff before I got reamed, they’d make me give up all the good stuff! To say nothing of my terror that the verdict might not be all that rosy.

Bottom line? I couldn’t get more medical treatment unless I followed up like I’d promised: my referral was already in the system, gosh darn it unless I got a colonoscopy as part of the Mayo thing. That way I could get everything checked in 72 hours, all under one roof, by the best of the best of the best. It was time to cowboy up and take my medicine.

Poker columnist for the New York Times and author of the bestseller Positively Fifth Street (2003), James McManus has also written four novels. He teaches writing and literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense

Behind the Book: My own learning process

Behind the Book by Dana Buchman

by Dana Buchman

I was an English major in college and have always adored reading. You might think the fact that I love books would make the prospect of writing one easier. In truth, it was the opposite. My reverence and respect for authors and books made the idea of writing a book intimidating. But I felt I had a story to tell a story that could help another parent whose child has a learning disability (or, as I prefer to call it, a learning difference). I travel around the country a lot doing trunk shows for my apparel company and I often hear women talking about children, nieces, nephews and children of friends who have LD. It always makes me think back to when I first found out about my daughter Charlotte’s LD almost 15 years ago. If I had known then what I know now, how different and easier those years would have been.

Since I wanted to write a book to help other parents who stood in my shoes, I realized that I would have to tell the truth. This, after all, was more a story of emotions than a straight narrative. If I were going to tell the story of how LD affected not only Charlotte, but me and our family, I’d have to make sure I told everything.

I’ve read that writers often don’t know what they’re going to say until they sit down and start writing, that the process of letting it flow of excavating the emotional story can be emotional in itself. That was certainly the case for me.

I wrote A Special Education: One Family’s Journey Through the Maze of Learning Disabilities as a series of free-writes. The hardest part was mining my memory and feelings. I would get up early, while the house was quiet, make a strong cup of black coffee and type and type not stopping to correct grammar or to format the paragraphs, not correcting or backspacing for anything. If I wanted to go back and say something a different way, I’d just go forward and say it a different way. The flow was essential. I was afraid that any pause would distract me from the difficult, often painful mission of looking at each stage of Charlotte’s growing up. Of our family’s growing up. Of my growing up. I could always tell when I had unearthed something important. It was invariably what was most painful, most embarrassing, buried the deepest. I’d invariably stop typing. Stop. And almost look over my shoulder as though someone were looking. Sometimes I’d utter the words I can’t say that out loud to the empty room.

But I knew that I had to, because the message of A Special Education is about letting feelings, vulnerabilities and imperfections show. It’s about how doing that heals us and makes us better how we become more whole and more human. I hope the parents who read this book will know that they are not alone. At the time, I thought I was alone. I thought that I was the only one who felt confused, anxious, angry, ashamed and overwhelmed by having a child with special needs. Now I see myself as part of a community of educators, of specialists . . . of other parents. And I see Charlotte much more clearly for who she is a brave young woman with unique abilities.

Dana Buchman’s line of women’s clothing can be found in major department stores around the country. She lives in New York City with her husband, Tom Farber, and their daughter Annie. Their eldest daughter, Charlotte Farber, is a college student in New England.

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Behind the Book: Debut goes beyond the veil