Thursday, October 30, 2008

Trick or Treat

samhainHalloween is one my favorite holidays because I love a good masquerade. The holiday originates from the old Celtic festival called Samhain (pronounced  "sah-win"). The Celts believed that the new year occurred on November 1, when the summer harvest was over and the cold winter was settling in. The night before the new year, October 31, the boundary between the living world and the dead became blurred, allowing the dead to walk the earth and the living to access a wider range of their powers.


When Christianity hit the land of the Celts in the 800s, the Church piggybacked on a lot of their rituals and altered them slightly so they became church-sanctioned. The Celts' new year became All Saints Day or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse, meaning All Saints' Day), and the night before became All Hallow's Eve. From that came what we now know as Halloween, where our little demons and ghouls walk the earth and collect candy to appease their souls.


Whee! In honor of the roots of Halloween, I offer you a trick and a treat. First, the trick, and I warn you that it's a really scary puzzle and you shouldn't do it if you have a heart condition. You need the sound turned on to hear the directions, and the link will take you to a new site where the maze is located (I don't have copyright rights to post it here).


 

 

bodytrauma
Now for the treat. A librarian just informed me of the HowDunit series, which I'm ashamed to say I've never heard of but if you are a mystery writer,  appears to be indispensible. The series was initially published by Writer's Digest and is a series of books written for crime fiction writers. There's a book on poisons, a book on crime scene investigation, a writer's guide howdunitto weapons, a writer's guide to private investigating, and my personal favorite: Body Trauma: A Writer's Guide to Wounds and Injuries, featuring such gems as, "What the Glasgow Coma Scale is, and why it's important," 'and, "The Dirty Dozen: dreadful-but survivable-chest injuries.". How have I been writing mysteries this long without this information?

Oh, and here's one more treat. A friend of mine got a Wonder Woman costume for Halloween when she was 10 years old, which would have been about 30 years ago. She'd don the red, white, and blue swimsuit, the white pleather go-wonder womango boots, the gold circlet on her head and the bullet-repelling bracelets, and strap on her golden lariat and wear it for days after Halloween had come and gone. She slept in this costume, and she got so good with the golden lariat that she actually roped one of her much-older sisters. My friend, Heidi-cum-Wonder Woman, said to her sister, "You must be honest with me as you are now  ensnared in the Lasso of Truth." And her sister said, "You're a dork." See? The lasso worked. Happy Halloween!

Sunday, October 05, 2008

The Janet Evanovich Interview, by Jess Lourey

  oneforthemoneyThanks to Janet Evanovich, I write humorous mysteries. (At least I hope they're funny.) About seven years ago, I was having no luck getting my embarrassingly autobiographical "fiction" published, and I needed something to distract me. A friend suggested I read One for the Money. Couldn't put it down. What a person likes to read is personal, but I consider that book one of the top ten best mysteries ever written. It hit all the right notes--suspense, humor, sex, food. When I found out there were more in the series, I devoured them. When I was at the end, and she wasn't writing fast enough, I decided to try my hand at it, and so, the Murder-by-Month series was born.

So yeah. She's one of my idols. And on a whim, I recently emailed her and asked if she would agree to a brief interview, made up of five questions only a Stephanie Plum geek could love. Imagine my surprise when she graciously answered them! Here is the interview:

 

JESS: You are famous for your dedication to your fans, touring when it is no longer a career necessity. What keeps you going back on the road? 

JANET: It's a way of staying in touch with my readers. And I love room service.

JESS: Ha! That room service never seems to find me in the basement of the Motel 8, but it's probably for the best. I don't know what they'd bring, but I'm pretty sure it'd have a hair in it. OK, next question. Tess Gerritsen tells a story of having one of the big dogs reviewing her first book. The review said, essentially, "This book will only appeal to readers who move their lips." Do you have any mortifying interview/review anecdotes that could make us mere mortal writers feel better about ourselves?

JANET: First, let me say that I've been known to move my lips while reading. Second, stop reading the reviews and interviews and use that time tojanet evanovich improve a couple sentences in chapter three. Third, just about everything I do is mortifying ...it's a way of life.

JESS: Hallelujah! Back in your pre-published days, you wrote a few novels that would be categorized as literary, or mainstream, fiction. Ever think about dusting those off, revising them using your hard-won writing skills, and publishing them?

JANET: Nope. They wouldn't meet reader expectation in their present form and the editing would be so time consuming it wouldn't be cost effective.

JESS: And I certainly don't want to pull you away from creating more Stephanie Plum adventures! OK, Mark Twain once said, "I prefer having written to writing." (He also said, "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society," but that's beside the point). How about for you? Do you enjoy the act of writing, or is it still a challenge, albeit a grand one?

JANET: I prefer writing to having written. I love the process, the isolation, the unique world I go into every morning. Once the book is off my desk it belongs to someone else. The only really good part to having written is that someone sends me a check which allows me to go on writing.

JESS: That is a nice perk! OK, here's the big one, the one many of your fans are dying to know. If you were single and Joe Morelli and Ranger both came to life, whom would you choose? (Morelli would come with a lifetime supply of Cheetos; Ranger w/limitless grocery store birthday cake with crusty buttercream frosting.)  

JANET: That's an easy one ...birthday cake.

Ha ha! Thank you to the lovely, ever-funny, and talented Janet Evanovich for her time. Happy fall, and thanks for reading!