“YOU KILLED THE CAT”

On my very first book tour, back in 1998, for HUSH, I had the pleasure of reading and signing at a mystery book shop in Tucson, Arizona. The two women who owned or ran the shop, I’m sorry I can’t recall their precise positions at this remove, said that they’d take me to dinner for heading down their way for the day. The now departed Tucson Citizen had given me a terrific review, one that’s still on my website’s blurb page, and I was feeling really good about the whole southern Arizona experience. I hadn’t been to Tucson for many years, and it was a chance to visit old friends, including the marvelous travel author Tom Miller.

I’d worked for New Times Weekly in the early seventies, and had met Miller on one of my trips to the underground paper’s Tucson office. I’d also been there just a few years earlier to get literally blind drunk at a senior day celebration at the University of Arizona. Senior as in high school. How drunk? A good friend sat up with me most of the night wondering how he was going to explain to my basketball coach that I’d died from an obscene overdose of Mexican moonshine.

The two women from the bookstore locked up and walked me to a Mexican restaurant. On the way one of them said “You broke the cardinal rule, you know.”

“I did?” I assumed she was referring to something about HUSH, and I was right.

“You killed the cat.”

Oh, boy, did I ever. There’s a scene in HUSH in which Celia, the art therapy protagonist, has locked herself in a bathroom to try to escape Chet, a horrendous killer. Let’s just say a poor bedraggled cat becomes Chet’s demonstration model for what will happen to Celia if she doesn’t unlock the door.

“I take it I shouldn’t have killed the cat.”

“No, you should never kill the cat,” the woman replied.

So I haven’t killed any domestic cats since HUSH. But, in PRIMITIVE, a really nice canine endures undeniable cruelty. Unlike the cat, he doesn’t die, but to see the reader reviews, I did far worse than kill him.

Now I certainly don’t take lightly any depiction of animal cruelty, and consider myself in many ways more sensitized to the subject now than I was ten years ago, even though in my diet I was avoiding most forms of flesh back then. But I was taken aback by readers who commented at length on a fluffy white dog’s suffering — and took me to task for showing it — without ever noting the book’s many implicitly positive references to the animal rights movement. I was also struck by the fact that most of the readers excoriating me never noted the far more extensive cruelty that humans were exposed to in the novel.

In short, I set off this mini-uproar by describing what happens to that white dog.  Just for the record, I have a dog, a fluffy white one as a  matter of fact.  I try to love him but I still miss my German shepherd, Kato, who lived in a mountain cabin with my wife and me for eight years.  He even spent a summer living in Hollywood.  He weighed one hundred twenty pounds, was well trained, and truly impressive.  I was working at Paramount, which at the time was in a fairly sketchy part of town.  My wife would drive down to pick me up when I got off work at eleven or twelve at night but I never worried about her.  Nobody was about to carjack that little Honda with Kato in the seat.  He never bit anyone, never even got in a dog fight; and let me tell you there were some strange canines in the L.A. dog park we frequented, and even stranger people, in some instances.  But Kato had an uncanny sense of humans, a kind of radar for them.  All he ever did, and he did it only a few times, was growl.  He sounded like a locomotive.  Twice he did it when we ran across hunters poaching on our land.  I never worried about my wife when she walked around L.A.  Kato, from all appearances, ignored everyone; but appearances were deceiving.  Nothing ever seemed to go unnoticed by him, but he was always by my wife’s side, in the heel.

We moved back to Oregon, sold the cabin, and settled in a subdivision.  Kato’s life went straight to hell.  Here was a dog who’d lived on a lot of acreage and kept the coyotes, cougars, and bears at bay for most of his first eight years.  Suddenly, he was in a subdivision.  It had to be hell.  It wasn’t real great for us, either, I might add.  What were we thinking? Those words crossed our minds on a number of occasions.

So I do care for dogs but I’m not sentimental about them.  I’ve had one great dog in my life, and that dog, of course, was Kato.  I have a dog now, as I’ve noted, that I try to love; but I don’t really.   Having Kato for almost twelve years gave me a gift that’s lasted for a long time now.  He’s been a wonderful model for all the dogs I’ve written about in my books.  Chaska, who suffers in PRIMITIVE, has some of Kato in him.  I would venture to say that if I hadn’t cared so much about Kato, readers wouldn’t ever have cared so much about Chaska.

SONGS THAT HAUNT YOUR HEAD

Maybe it’s because it’s Halloween. Maybe it’s because I spent too much time in the car to get to and from a reading at an arts center in Hood River, Oregon. Or maybe it’s just because some songs get lodged in my head and WON’T STOP PLAYING! (Yes, I meant to convey that bit of the craziness.)

I was listening to a sixties station on Sirius when the old Rolling Stones song “Out of Time” came on. I hadn’t heard it in years and really enjoyed it. At some level, I might have enjoyed it too much because it just keeps on playing. I wake up in the middle of the night to use the facilities, and there it is, as if it never sleeps. The hit that just keeps on coming…forty plus years later.

At least it’s a song that’s marginally pleasant to listen to…even if it’s for the thousandth time in the past week. There’s an obsessive compulsive quality to its presence that makes me wonder if authors are particularly susceptible to this, well, affliction. I say that because brain scans of authors, as I recall, bear intriguing similarities to the brain scans of people who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder.

I wasn’t surprised when I read that years ago. I can’t let a chapter go out to my circle of early readers without pouring over every syllable for days. And I rewrite constantly. In fact, one of the nice things about blogging is that I don’t rewrite over and over, which you might have figured out on your own by now.

Stephen King once wrote a column for Entertainment Weekly magazine about songs that play in his head. He said that you just have to let them play themselves out, clearly suggesting that sometimes, at least, he has a rather active mental soundtrack. Of course, he’s a musician as well, right? So I’m guessing what he hears has a fidelity sorely lacking in my mind, although Mick Jagger does sound pretty true to form as I hear him, but that could be my lame inner ear testifying.

Of course Stephen King might have achieved his equanimity because he’s never had to put up with that “B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, and Bingo was his name-o song.” An editor friend of mine from my days directing segments for Hard Copy at Paramount once had that bit of insipid songwriting play in his head for days. Or was it weeks? It was hellish, as he reports, in any case.

Certainly, it makes me realize that nothing on this day of masks and make believe craziness can rival the real madness of our own minds, even in its more benevolent manifestations.

“You’re out of touch, my baby…” blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah…

HARDCORE FANS AND HAPPINESS

Most folks who come to my readings have become familiar with my novels only recently. I’m guessing that hardcore fans, if they show up, don’t always let you know of their presence. Why do I say that? Wouldn’t they want to make themselves known? I’m not sure. Based on reader reviews of my earlier books, some folks who like my work also question my sanity. That’s in addition, of course, to the readers who don’t question it all because they think I’m a psychopath and warn other readers to turn around and run the other way if they ever meet me. I’m not kidding; you can see these kinds of comments on the Amazon pages.

But this doesn’t bother me because I figure that I’m doing my job well if readers simply cannot distinguish between the author and his work.

Then there are the hardcore fans who seek you out. A young woman came up to me at a reading the other night holding a copy of PRIMITIVE and a dog-eared advance review copy of THE BONE PARADE. At a glance, I knew that the latter had been read many times. If further confirmation were needed, it came when she told me that she adored BP and had, indeed, read it over and over.

Her name was Caitlin, and she said she’d started reading me at fifteen. After BP, she’d gone back to HUSH, read that, and then read SEARCH ANGEL when it came out.

“I’ve been waiting years for you to come back here so I could get you to sign this.” She held out the weathered copy of BP and an unwrinkled trade paperback of PRIMITIVE. I was so pleased to inscribe both books for her, and only gently surprised when her mother took a photograph of her daughter standing next to me. It was a cozy reminder that readers’ passions are very important to us. Now here’s what I truly love: Even as I write these words, with my wife driving down an interstate to Portland, Oregon, my eleven year old daughter is in the seat right behind me saying ”Oh God, Oh God, he’s such an evil bastard.” No, she’s not talking about me, but about a character in the audio book that she’s listening to.

I strongly suspect that someday my daughter may be approaching the author of a book that made her emote, and saying something like “I’ve been waiting years for you to come back here so I can have you sign this book.”

Or perhaps she’ll be an author herself. She’s already started writing two novels. One of these days she may finish one of them. Or both. Or maybe those chapters will be like the novel I started writing at age eight. I never finished it but it was definitely a starting point.

Reader Insights at Author Readings

A friend and reader collared me after I read from PRIMITIVE at an arts center to say that the book was all about abandonment. That gave me pause because I hadn’t thought about abandonment as a theme. And this particular reader, an old friend, Kevin Donald, had told me a story years ago that had provided the seeds of Sonya’s abduction, which occurs in chapter one. So I was inclined to listen to him.

Kevin explained that Sonya, like most of the models he’s known – Kevin still models occasionally – was narcissistic, an element of her personality that her daughter Darcy, recognizes, and that Sonya herself comes to see, though perhaps with less insight or force than does Darcy. Kevin went on to say that Sonya’s psychological abandonment of her daughter through much of her youth mirrors the way we’ve abandoned the earth with our own narcissism, which I agree is greatly exacerbated by consumerism and its attendant demands for self-gratification in every possible way, regardless of its impact on the earth.

I bring this up because readers often point out themes in my work that I haven’t noticed. It happened when another old friend, author and journalism professor Mark Feldstein, pointed out a couple of years ago that in writing Primitive I was writing a highly allegorical novel. He’d noticed that at one point Sonya was placed in an underground cell, and as Mark noted it bore a resemblance, a pretty obvious one, to the spider hole in which Saddam Hussein was found by U.S. military forces. Up to that point I hadn’t been at all conscious of the parallels between what I was writing and the greater world events that were transparently – to others, not to me –informing the novel.

I was grateful for the insights. That they were necessary — that I hadn’t seen these obvious parallels — didn’t bother me at all. I think when we write fiction much of our work is imbued with elements that we rarely identify consciously in the early drafts, nor would we necessarily want to identify them at that time. Our job is to tell a story, and if the story resonates, well, that’s great. That’s one indication that we’re cooking on all the burners.

So I’ve learned to listen to readers at author events; often they have insights into my work that have eluded me. I don’t get out to meet them that often, but every time I do I’m reminded that there is an audience and that their appreciation plants seeds of its own.

Picking Passages for a Reading Event

It’s a touchy business, picking out passages for a reading event. I’m finding that this is particularly true with PRIMITIVE. It contains strong thriller elements and lots of narrative tension, and I don’t want to destroy the reading experience by using “spoiler” material, to use the lexicon of Tinseltown.

The simplest approach I could take is to check my watch, read for thirty plus minutes, and quit on a line that I can intone with some sense of finality…but not too much finality because I want the audience to anticipate the even richer developments to follow.

But there’s a big problem taking this approach with PRIMITIVE: potential readers would only have heard about the protagonist, Sonya Adams. And they would have heard only about Sonya at the start of the story. There’s an intriguing and, at least from my POV, a compelling arc to her character. Moreover, she’s not the only important character. There are also Darcy, Akiah, Chandra, Johnny Bracer, Lotus Land…the list goes on because there are, at last count (they may be multiplying) more than forty-five characters with speaking parts, to borrow yet another term from H’wood.

So what am I doing? I’m making surgical strikes to lift text, setting aside passages that can stand on their own without much of a preamble; but I’m also altering passages ever so slightly to avoid “reveals.”

This presented its greatest challenge with a passage that I particularly love. It comes when Darcy meets The Ten Tribes of the New Apocalypse. A lot has just happened to Darcy, so what I’ve done to avoid giving away too much of the plot is to omit the identity of the man she’s just killed. It leaves mystery for the audience while providing them with information necessary for understanding Darcy’s emotional state. And given that this is a novel with scores of plot lines, I think it’s likely that many readers will forget what they’ve heard at a reading until after they’ve read this part of the book. That’s when I trust they’ll have their “Oh, that’s right” moment, as opposed, let’s say, to a more profane thought of the author giving away too much at his reading.

In any case, I’m asked quite a bit about my favorite part of the book. I’d like to fudge this answer and say that each part of PRIMITIVE is essential, which, of course, it is to the overall story, and that therefore it’s hard for me to answer that question. Doesn’t that sound like utter crap? Here’s the truth: By the time Darcy meets up with the Ten Tribes, I, and I think many readers, need and want a breather, and we get it in this section. It’s fun, funny, romantic, and a respite — the break before the harrowing final chapters, none of which make an appearance at my readings.

Coincidences and Other Maladies

I read “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Steig Larsson and thoroughly enjoyed it. I eagerly awaited the second volume of his trilogy, and finally had a chance to start reading it this weekend. What a disappointment “The Girl Who Played with Fire” turned out to be, and the displeasure was rooted fully in the author’s use of coincidence.

I can take a coincidence in a book — In “Primitive” Sonya’s abduction takes place on her daughter Darcy’s birthday — as long as the coincidence isn’t used by an author to move along the plot. Even then, I’ve heard it said that an author can have one coincidence in a book. Maybe. I’m not so sure. If you have protagonist finding a weapon, for which there is no foundation or antecedent, at a key moment is not forgivable (and yes, it’s been done). Larsson does it twice in a matter of pages when he has his protagonist happen to notice an antagonist at a key point while she’s shoppting, an observation that leads to her learning information key to her survival; and then not long after this contrived event her erstwhile lover happens to observe her — after a very long separation — as she’s assaulted at night by a thug.

Sorry, can’t buy it, and no one else should, either. It’s particularly painful when it comes from an author whose previous work was first-rate.

Even so, I thought I’d finish the book; but then my eyes alighted on an old Michael Connelly novel, which I picked up and started, and one page led to another. Need I add that Larsson’s book rests where I left it?

We have an obligation to play fair with readers. If we violate that obligation, we lose them. If you haven’t read him, by all means read “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” And by all means forget the second one.

The Easiest Job I Ever Had

I’ve been doing radio interviews this week, the first with CBC’s Sheryl MacKay, and the second with Tamasine Drisdale (Tamasine, what a great name, right? The kind of name that will end up in one of my books.), who works at a community co-op radio station in Nelson, British Columbia. In both instances I was reminded that radio was the easiest money I ever made.

I worked in radio full-time for only about two years. This would have been back in ‘75 to 77. Somewhere around there. I had a talk show in Phoenix that ran from 6-7:00 every night. All I ever did to prepare was read, usually the books that the authors were pitching. I interviewed lots and lots of folks, including Jerry Rubin and Timothy Leary.

Rubin was strange. He showed up with a reporter from the Arizona State University newspaper, and insisted that the guy, about my age, I should add, sit in for the interview. I wasn’t real stoked about it but Rubin wouldn’t budge. Fine, whatever. During the interview he responded to even tough questions with surprising equanimity, but during the commercial breaks he was about as talkative as stone. At the end of the show, I thanked him and he said — words to this effect — “I want to say something else,” and I thought, Oh yeah, here it comes. He said, again words to this effect, “I just want to thank you for actually reading my book and asking good questions.” Still brusque, for sure, but grudgingly endearing. I signed off and he left with his student reporter in tow, and still wearing a frown that appeared better suited to a bathroom emergency.

But here’s what’s interesting: After I started publishing, I understood his gratitude. Rarely, and I mean rarely, do reporters or talk show hosts actually read your book. This week, however, I had the enormously pleasurable experience of finding that both Sheryl MacKay and Tamasine Drisdale had read PRIMITIVE, and they understood it. They couldn’t have asked the questions that came to them if they hadn’t spent hours with the novel. So often as an inteviewee, I’ve had to do the heavy lifting: that is, I’ve had to take insipid questions and segue from them to the material that I wanted to address most. But when an interviewer is probing, even challenging, you’re at your best. And you feel…grateful. Just like Jerry Rubin.

As for Tim Leary? He looked and sounded bored. But I still loved his autobiography, the hardcover with the shiny silver cover. “Flashbacks” was the title, if I’m remembering correctly.

Checking the Numbers, and Other Numbing Activities

I’m not at all that sure that updates on amazon and fictionwise.com are all that helpful. With a new book out, it’s too tempting to check every hour or so — and I’ve heard of authors checking a whole lot more often than that. And what do those numbers mean anyway? I saw that I was #27 in mystery/thrillers on Fictionwise.com this week (Dan Brown was #1 and will probably remain so until 2017), but I was in the 200,000 plus range on amazon. What a strange disconnect. But maybe not. See, I’m checking numbers that I don’t even understand. Then I happened to notice about a week ago that even this blog site has a “Views per day” graph indicating how many folks had stopped by to read a posting. Now THAT I can understand. So yes, I’ve found myself even pausing at times to see if I have any readers. And I do. Thank you!

But the paucity of real information to come out of any of these updates about book sales is too appalling to contemplate, given the amount of time that checking can consume. Argh!

It’s the same syndrome that afflicts so many of us with email. I realized a while back that when I’m writing I simply had to shut off email. That little bell becomes a siren call that I can’t resist. This is particularly true when my agent has a book out to publishers. I try to remind myself that agents generally call with good news, and email when there’s a rejection; but, alas, that’s not enough to restrain me. So I shut the sucker off; otherwise, there’s no hope that I’ll get any work done.

Though not a particularly spiritual person, I try to adopt a Buddhist attitude of non-attachment, and I’ve had a great deal of success, I’d say, in achieving this in my professional life (try pulling this off with the welfare of your children, though, and it’s humbling). But then I’ll notice a couple of hours have gone by and, after all, it’ll only take a few seconds to check. Sure, Mark, go ahead. Maybe the numbers are yo-yoing upward. And maybe…
Yes, maybe I should just get back to work.

Dream Schemes

I awakened last night to a dream related to a novel I’ve been thinking about writing. I’ve been jotting down notes about the book a great deal lately. When a dream related to my work hits me, I do two things: I pull out my notebook — the little black one that’s always with me — and I give a private thanks.

My publishing career began with a dream. It was back in the early nineties when I lived in a log cabin on acreage up in the Oregon mountains. I went to bed with a fever and was awakened by a wretched nightmare that featured rats in an emergency holding tank that was part of a firefighting system I had for the cabin; I was outside the fire district and forest fires were a serious concern.

I recorded the dream in a dream book, then realized it formed the core of a plot and, though still running a high fever, I wrote a twenty-three page short story. Months passed before I returned to the effort. I was finishing a novel and didn’t want to get off track. When I did return to the short story, it took me a couple of months to polish it and get it ready for my agent.

About the time I finished it, I went to work as Jerry Brown’s press secretary for his 1992 campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. I wrote virtually no fiction for the next six months, packed as they were with campaigning in one city and burg after another. It was a great experience, one that I may go into at another point on this blog. I did manage to call my agent when we were campaigning somewhere in the Midwest. I hoped to hear that he’d sold my short story. No one had bought any of my fiction to this point. But my agent said he hadn’t even attempted to sell it. I felt thoroughly deflated before he added that it was a great story that could make an even better novel, and that if I published it as a short story someone else would take the idea and run with it.

So that’s exactly what I did after the Brown campaign ended – I returned to my cabin and spent a couple of years writing “Hush,” which became my first published novel (St. Martin’s, 1998). I say a “couple of years” because even then I don’t think I knew exactly how long that very dark psychological thriller took me to write. I do know that at one point I came up with the idea to adapt the book to a screenplay, reasoning that it would force me to focus more on plot and less on the internal lives of the characters; their thoughts and feelings had taken over the story in ways that felt unmanageable to me.

Adapting it proved wonderfully effective, btw, in paring the story of its excesses. Not that the characters were left barren of feeling. Hardly. The novel received a lot of praise for the internal life of all its characters, including the murderous broodings of Chet Boyce. And the “rat tank,” as I came to think of it? Yes, it played a role in the book, but not nearly as large a role as it played in my life by providing a means to finding the plot that would form the basis of my first published book.

All of this comes to mind because of the dream I had last night. Interestingly enough, at least to me, it involved animals again. And as I said, it woke me up. I don’t keep a formal dream journal, as I did many years ago. When I became a father some things had to go, and lack of sleep because such a factor that I couldn’t wrest myself from bed to write down dreams. Thankfully, the stories found other means of presenting themselves. But the dreams still return with their silent schemes, or not so silent in some cases, and I still give a private thanks.

Two Novels

I’ve finished reading two novels recently, one that has received a great deal of attention — and deservedly so — while the other was published by a small press and might have appeared below the radar of most readers. Both were written in first person, and both offer a highly idiosyncratic and immensely persuasive protagonist.

“Netherland” by Joseph O’Neill is the highly regarded novel, and I’ll note it only briefly because it’s already garnered so much praise. Suffice it to say that I relished every page, and found the encomiums fully justified.

“Pay Here” by Charles Kelly is the novel that you might not have read, or heard much about for that matter. It’s published by Point Blank Press, a smaller house. A pity, if you’ve missed this gem. Its setting in the Arizona desert is no less richly evoked than the Manhattan and London of “Netherland.”

(Disclosure time: I knew the author, Charles Kelly, when I worked as a reporter in Arizona in the ’70s, and we’ve had a two or three contacts in the past thirty years. I like him, but I’d never herald his novel if I didn’t think it was first-rate.)

“Pay Here” is so sharp that it’ll bring all your senses to life. No surprise, then, that it brought to mind one of the books that most influenced my own work, “A Natural History of the Senses” by Diane Ackerman. After reading it many years ago, I realized that I needed to bring alive much more than the sights and sounds in a character’s life. That’s what “Pay Here” does so well. It takes us into a world most of us have never known, and it makes it come so alive that you can feel the Arizona sun on your skin, and smell the mesquite in the air.