I know by the nose

Thanks to the folks over at Jacket Whys as well as Lisa Yee, I know there are at least two other books using the same photo as part of the cover art for their books. Look at the guy’s nose – it’s the same! Oh well, at least I have fire. The other two don’t have that.

Why The Hunger Games is such a great book

This weekend, I finished The Hunger Games. While it's a dramatic, fast-paced book, I also actually cried a couple of times. It was the kind of book that ideally would be read in one sitting.

While I mostly lost myself in it as a reader, I also went back later and looked at it as a writer. One thing the author did really well was to have exciting or interesting chapter endings that really made you want to read forward. Here are some examples (ones with no spoilers):

Chapter 2
Oh, well, I think. There were will be twenty-four of us. Odds are someone else will kill him before I do.

Of course, the odds have not been very dependable of late.

Chapter 4
Which also means that kind Peeta Meelark, the boy who gave me the bread, is fighting hard to kill me.

Chapter 5
But because two can play at this game, I stand on tiptoe and kiss his cheek. Right on the bruise.

Chapter 6
I wonder if she will enjoy watching me die.

The Hunger Games is a great book for readers – and writers.

The Power of Sales

All of my adult books have kept their titles (Circles of Confusion, Square in the Face - although the publisher briefly suggested Death Squared or Be There or Be Square, Heart-Shaped Box, Buried Diamonds, and Learning to Fly.] Not so with my YA books.

Like my next book – which was sold as Fire, Kiss, Electric Chair – is now called Torched. I guess there was some worry that “electric chair” might be a turn-off.

The YA before that was going to be called Point & Shoot, because it started with a digital camera and ended with a Taser. But Sales thought "shoot" could limit sales because buyers might read it as a gun reference, especially in the school and library market. They had a suggestion for a replacement title: Panic at Peaceful Cove.

Gak! It sounded like Nancy Drew. It sounded like Jessica Fletcher. It sounded like some old people at a nursing home freaking out at the sight of a spider.

My agent and I sent back our own suggestions, including:
Prisoner of Peaceful Cove
Nightmare at Peaceful Cove
You Can Run
On the Run
Run
Hide
Gone [good thing they didn’t take that one, both a Jonathan Kellerman and a Lisa Gardner with that title came out at the same time about a year ago]
Taken
Running Scared
Darkness and Daylight
Category 5

And Shock Point, which is what it became.

Deciding for everyone

A mother in the Oregon small town of Halsy wants to have a graphic novel banned from the high school library. It's called Bunny Suicides, and it shows cartoons of bunnies taking rather elaborate steps to kill themselve, like sawing down a Christmas tree with a star on top and running so that when the tree topples the star hits them on the head.

Even though it's a graphic novel, the drawings I've seen are not particularly graphic. The librarian said they are designed to reveal to reluctant readers, although "readers" might also be a bit of a stretch, since the cartoons I've seen don't have words.

However, does the subject matter give the mother the right to keep the book? She refuses to return it (it's the only copy the library owns) so they can evaluate it. She also says that if the library replaces it, "I'll have somebody else check it out and I'll keep that one."

She also says she plans to burn the book.

When asked what bad outcomes the book might lead to, she wrote, "All different kinds of things."

Good grief! Of all the possible things to get het up about, this is one? When I was a kid we used to tell dead baby jokes, another example of jarring juxtaposition. And we turned out okay.

Your choice of words reveals your secret thoughts

A new software program and a new field of study counts how many times a person writes or says different kinds of words. Your word choice can indicate what sex you are, if you’re lying, whether your mental health is improving after a trauma, and all kinds of interesting things.

Read more here.

Laura Lippman hits the big time

I met Laura Lippman in 2000, when I went to all the big mystery conferences and learned that my first book, Circles of Confusion, had not won any of the best first mystery awards. (But it was shortlisted, which was nice. Of course, the competition for best first is nothing like the free-for-all that is “best” because the competition is so much stiffer.) I was even sitting at the same table when she won an award, so I got to hear the little started sound you make when they call your name.

Laura was and is tall, beautiful, smart, and somewhat intimidating. The kind of person who quotes Nabokov. I am more likely to quote The Far Side.

When I met her, she had already made her way up from being a paperback original mystery author (often the beginning and end of a career) and her books were being released in hardcover. Now they hit the NYT bestseller list.

To read more about Laura, click here

The Year We Disappeared

Imagine your a 9-year-old trying to cope with a new reality. Cops keep watch over your house, there's a sniper on your roof, an attack dog in your yard, and you and your brothers are learning how to shoot to kill. That's the true story Cylin Busby tells in The Year We Disappeared. Cylin's father, a cop, was shot point blank in the face. He lived, but his jaw was destroyed. He knew who was behind the attack, but because of small town cronyism, no one was arrested. Instead, the town had him and his family watched round the clock, including putting a cop on duty in Cylin's lunchroom. She lost all her friends, because their parents were afraid that to invite her over made them a target.

I stayed up too late reading it last night, because of passages like this:  
A boy I'd never seen before leaned over our [cafeteria[ table. "you know why that cop is in here?" he asked.

"Go away, Ritchie," Amelia said, rolling her eyes at me.

"Because somebody wants to kill her!" he said, pointing at me. The he whispered, "Maybe they'll come to school and shoot you, too, that's why the cop is here."

Amelia stood up. "Mrs. Maseda," she yelled over to the teacher who was monitoring the lunchroom.

"Tattletale," the boy said under his breath. As he walked away, he turned and made a gun with his fingers, pointed at me, and said, "Pow, pow."

Why not hire some decoys on Craiglist and commit a robbery?

Up in Munroe Washington, a guy advertised on Craigslist for workers for a road maintenance project. The ad promised $28.50 an hour. Those who answered the ad were told to meet near the Bank of America in Monroe, at 11 a.m. on Tuesday. They were told to wear a yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask and, if possible, a blue shirt.

About a dozen men showed up. Only there wasn't a job - instead the men were decoys. A man dressed in the same outfit, including a respirator mask, assaulted an armored car guard with pepper spray and ran off with a bag of money.

The robber fled on foot toward a nearby creek, and one witness said he floated away on a waiting inner tube.

Getting my life back

Eight months ago I did the thing I had been dreaming about for years - I spent my last day at my day job. Well, it was more like three hours, because all my projects had been parcelled out to my co-workers. All I really needed to do was box up my things and say goodbye.

My life used to be such a blur: writing a book a year, parenting, wife-ing, cooking, exercising. I spent big chunks of life in my car driving as fast as I could. Now I walk most places. It's weird. Seen this way, the trees and bushes and flowers I walk past look too three-dimensonial, like they're somehow fake, part of a movie set. I've seen flowers and birds and insects I never noticed before. 

Recently I had been puzzled by the apperance of crocuses - a flower I associate with the first few days of spring - in people's gardens. Was it a sign of global warming? But my husband says there is a fall crocus. There must have always have been fall crocuses, but I didn't have the time or the peace to notice them.

I've dreamed of these days since 1992, when I finished my first novel (which didn't sell, but that's another story). It's wonderful to have my life back. No more annual reviews, no more meetings, no more people who are above me but whom I don't agree with, no more watching yet another reorg, no more buzz words.  

And no more paychecks. This may not end up working out in the long run, but I sure hope it does. Because it's wonderful to have my life back.