She describes the journals she writes for each of her novels, calling them “long, whiney conversations I have with myself about what I’m doing.” She says she thrown out far too many ideas that she decides would not be workable, hoping for inspiration to strike. She also tries very hard to keep the voice she calls “Ego” from taking over her work, preferring to let the voice she’s named “Shadow” to write. “Shadow knows how to write books. . .Shadow is that still, quiet voice in your soul that tells you if you’re on track or off track.”

This newest book has Kinsey’s curiosity roused when a young man presents himself in her office, claiming to have seen two men burying an abducted child when he was a youth. Although Kinsey finds out this fellow is known to stretch the truth, enough of his story checks out to involve her. And she’s off and running. . .

The book has tons of twists and turns, enough to satisfy any Milhone fan.  Grafton says her husband is her first reader, and this is his favorite of the novels. “He loves this book.”

I found it interesting that Grafton admits that this series was born during a brutal divorce, when she imagined various ways to murder said ex!  She found a wealth of ideas to start Kinsey on her adventures.

Grafton says each book has gotten harder and harder to write.  Even as she admits one of her favorite sayings is “trust the process,”  she says she has to keep reminding herself that  writing “should be a form of play.”

As an author awaiting the release of my own first novel, I take great comfort in Grafton’s words:

I keep saying the fate of the free world does not hang in the balance. Even if I write a book that fails, nothing will happen. I’ll be mortified and embarrassed, but lives will not be lost over this.”

Amen to that!

Today I re-wrote my author’s bio for the umpteenth time. I have many versions of it: a short , a shorter, a short-short, a micro-mini, a long, a complete, a new, a newer-to-date, etc.

It is important to update a bio frequently and make necessary changes–add, delete, change, substitute, etc. because as writers, we are constantly sending our bios out to a vast array of people. The bio goes inside cover letters,  query letters, is sent to agents, to editors and to publishers.

I keep a separate CV as well.   And I update it often, and so should you.

You know the drill–read the excerpt and leave a comment!  This week’s hook is from Mitt Winstead’s upcoming novel Evil in the Mirror available this May at Amazon.com.

www.murdermysteryevilinthemirror.com

www.evilinthemirror.blogspot.com

CHAPTER 22

Dave, Meet the Cartel

“That pinche gringo Pete has split with fifty kilos of our pot, patron,” Sanchez announced to Jesus, as he was eating lunch at a posh restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico. The drug cartel leader put down his fork and dabbed his mouth with a napkin, while his eyes grew dark and narrow.

“You know what to do, Sanchez, when you find him. Meanwhile, watch all his main dealers and do what you have to do to find this gringo son of a bitch.”

Sanchez was a trusted enforcer for the cartel, and he moved quickly to track down Pete or anyone else thought to be an accomplice. He was particularly interested in Dave, because Pete had often bragged about the jock from Escondido who sold more pot than any other dealer. Sanchez had gringo dealers all over San Diego County willing to watch Dave like a hawk, with the promise of getting Pete’s territory. It wasn’t long before word got back to Sanchez that Pete had gotten himself murdered in Tucson. The cartel rules were explicit. If you couldn’t get Pete, you got his closest associate. The rip-off could not go unpunished. At that point, Dave’s life was worthless.

A white van with FTD painted on the sides drove up to Dave’s house at about 10 p.m. A lone driver walked up to the front door and rang the bell. After a few minutes, the delivery driver tried the door handle and discovered it was unlocked. He waved to the van and two more men walked quickly to the door, where all three entered the house, holding drawn pistols.

They found Dave crashed out in his bedroom. He was quickly tied up and duct tape wrapped around his head and mouth. The men carried Dave to the van, deposited him in the back, and covered him with flowers. The abduction was quick, almost noiseless, and efficient. No one on the block heard or saw anything except for Sanchez, who was parked halfway down the block in a nondescript car. Both vehicles headed south on Highway 395 toward San Diego, and a half hour later they were headed east on Interstate 8 toward El Centro. After driving an hour and a half, the van and car crossed the Mexican border without incident and pulled into a gated compound close to San Felipe.

Dave regained enough of his senses to understand something was very wrong. He couldn’t move his hands or feet, and his mouth was bound so tightly that making a noise was impossible. David heard a garage door open as the van drove inside a building, and then the door closed noisily behind them. The men carried Dave out of the van and dumped him like a sack of shit alongside a large hole in the earthen floor of the garage. The dirt smelled putrid, and it was far worse than anything Dave had ever smelled. The men started talking in Spanish, while laughing at the teenager lying in the filthy dirt.

Dave started shaking uncontrollably and he urinated in his pants, at which point Sanchez leaned over and simply said, “Adios, gringo.” The men began kicking Dave until he fell into the hole and landed on his face and chest. He wanted to scream, but no sound could escape the tape’s grip. He felt something being poured on his back and head. Soon, the powdery substance trickled down the side of his face and caused a burning sensation so intense that Dave started to convulse like a worm in a hot frying pan. The men finished pouring the lye mixture over Dave’s convulsing body and then shoveled dirt to cover the white, squirming mound until it reached the floor level and there was no longer any movement.

Sanchez was pleased with the night’s work. He left the garage and headed for a phone booth anticipating the report he would give Jesus. Unfortunately for the parents of Dell and Dave Wilson, they would have to continue life without either of their children. Dave thought of that, just before his light faded to darkness.

I remember how you looked that long, humid night—rabid and fierce.

Your mother made some kind of bitter holistic root tea we drank.

In the den, your dad was practicing Japanese for his next trip,

while your brother Scotty was teaching an egg to do tricks

on the speckled Formica kitchen counter.

We snuck out behind your house that endless June night,

to the vacant Baptist school, to the place where the moon nested

with the mockingbirds in the branches of an old banyan tree.

On the front patio, a one-winged palmetto bug flopped into the wall

as your dog Ankota mercilessly pawed it from one corner to the next.

“Hear that?”

“Hear what?”

Music dancing through the leaves gave you reason enough to touch me.

Bio: Laura McDermott, a true native of South Florida, studied creative writing at FSU and received her MFA from FIU while concentrating on poetry in her studies. Currently, Laura is a full time instructor on temporary status at Broward College – South Campus, as well as a part-time instructor at Florida International University and Johnson and Wales University.  For the past five years, she’s served as the Festival Coordinator of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.  Because of her dedication to higher education and writing, Laura received recognition as a 2008 Conference on College Composition and Communication Professional Equity Project Grant Recipient.

He also said that he learns the craft of writing by teaching a great story or poem. It’s something many teachers have said, including me.  If you want to get to the heart of  somehting and truly understand it–teach it to someone else.

And jumpinng to another topic entirely, let me offer this.  Last night I had a dream and in it someone asked me, What is your mission in life?  Not a bad thing to contemplate, so today I am donating time to answer this question. Why don’t you try to answer it too?  If nothing else, it’ll give us some insights we might not have pondered before.

I’ve always been in love with my books. My library shelves were so filled to overflowing that I had a mega-clean-out a few months ago, and it literally took me days to decide which beauties I could bear to part with the for library in town or the prison library in our county, where my donations end up.

Now the Oxford University Press has published a two-volume compendium that will definitely be on my Christmas/Birthday list this year. Yes, it’s pricey at $ 275, but it’s one of those items I’d happily take for all of my gifts for both those occasions without batting an eye.

The Oxford Companion to the Book promises to be the anything and everything you could want to know about books, from antiquity to the age of Kindle and Nook.  Since the earliest books were treated as sacred texts, reader and those who were read to treated books as a source of divine revelation.  The books were often kissed before and after use.

Now I’m not in favor of bringing back that tradition, but I do get a wonderful feel of satisfaction after finishing a wonderfully told story, written in clear prose with bright imagery. Although threatened recently with extinction by these new electronic devices, I believe nothing will change the heady anticipation of opening the pages of a new book. And as a writer, nothing will ever replace that feel of the blank page that becomes filled with words I’ve chosen.

A review in the Wall Street Journal by author Norman Lebrecht (The Life and Death of Classical Music), describes the enormity of this FIFTEEN-year project, written by 398 scholars from 27 countries and the results of its editors:

Unusually in an academic compendium, Father {Michael} Suarez, director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and Mr. {HR} Woudhuysen, professor of English at University College, London, set out to give as much pleasure as knowledge and to have some fun along the way. . .it is completely unnecessary but humanly warmaing to find out that “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” was originally titled “Tenderness.”

Lebrecht goes on to warm my heart even further as he discusses this set of books as being about the book as object:

It is a fount of knowledge where the Internet is but a slot machine. It refreshes where Google merely sates. We will always need books for the depth of memory, the free association of random thought. This dangerous two-tome sits on my living room shelf, an irresistible distraction.

Auntie M agrees; what say you, dear reader?

Think about what this means to you and your writing and have a creative day!

His first novel was such a extraordinary best-seller, he felt the bar was set so high for a second novel that he had a difficult time beginning the writing, and can be quoted saying  he had “this almost pathological fear of boring the  reader.”  

 Hosseini’s second novel, a much more ambitious one than the first, A Thousand Splendid Suns, seems to be his answer to a challenge he was afraid to meet.  Personally, I loved it—enjoyed looking for the distinguishable marks of change that the author made—and think every woman in the world should read it.  Nevertheless, back to the argument of second novels—let’s face it they are hard to write, especially after a successful first one.

 So what can you do about this problem?  I’m not saying my work is a phenomenal success, I can merely supply an answer to what to do about second novels.  Authors and novelists, here’s what I did.

 I wrote a novel, got an agent, and the novel was sent to about twenty editors.  One of these was even Hosseini’s editor. I received these oxymoronic letters: the writing is strong, or evocative, or lyrical or spellbinding, BUT it’s not marketable. How could that be?

 Okay, I thought, I’ll put it away and write another.  That’s precisely what I did, and that’s precisely what anyone out there who has faced rejection should do.  Write another novel.  Now this second novel will be your first, and if it is picked up, will probably stand more of a chance then your first one, which will now become your second novel.  With the experience of writing another novel, you can now face that first one now dubbed “your second,” and make it stronger and marketable. 

 Maybe, just maybe, it’ll be better than your first.  Why? You’ve gained much more experience. Surely, you won’t have trouble beginning it, because all you’ll have to do is read it over, make notes, and then revise it. Read it again and make final changes.  You’ll save yourself time, emotional roller-coaster feelings of self-doubt, and be able to send your agent that “second novel” sooner rather than later. How long did it take you to get that final draft you sent out? Think of all the time saved!

 Of course, it helps if you have a terrific writing group like the one I have to give you support.  It helps if you’ve co-authored The End of the Book: Writing in a Changing World, or if at least you’ve downloaded it and read it!

 There is no perfect writing—there is only re-writing. Deal with it. Good luck.