Writing in Paradise...Usually

 I’ve enjoyed some of the blogs here on Type M that detail locations where our fellow bloggers like to write and some of their writing habits.  As many of you know, I live on the coast of North Carolina.  We have a house on Bogue Banks Island, which is a barrier island south of the Outer Banks.

It sounds exotic—saying I live on an island.  It’s about twenty-one miles long and at its narrowest point, you can see both the ocean on one side of the island and Bogue Sound on the other. It’s a vacation destination with thousands of vacation homes, about ten hotels, and fabulous restaurants, boutique shops, and stores where you can buy anything from swimming suits to fishing tackle. 

In the “off season”, late autumn, winter, and early spring, it’s very quiet here.  There are times you can walk the beach and not see another soul.  That’s when I enjoy this island the most.  

But this is June and while it’s not yet officially summer, we are inundated with tourists.  The restaurants all have long lines, the grocery stores are overcrowded, and the roads are clogged with people trying to find their way around. 

I’m not complaining because this is when businesses here on the coast make their money.  Our county has a year-round population of slightly less than seventy-thousand people.  During the “season”, that grows to over two-hundred and fifty thousand people.  It can put a strain on infrastructure and that includes the internet.

Think of it as a pipeline from one end of the island to the other.  During the “off season” demand isn’t particularly stressful.  But when we have two-hundred thousand people out here, all downloading Netflix or playing World of Warcraft, that internet pipeline clogs up quickly.

Case in point, my publisher has re-released my first book Random Road. Our publicist arranged to have a Zoom interview with me and Barbara Peters from the Poisoned Pen Bookstore.  Full disclosure, Barbara has been one of the editors on all of my Geneva Chase mysteries.  

She told me that the interview would go anywhere from a half-hour to an hour, depending on how well it went.  

It was awful.

The internet kept dropping the Zoom connection.  She’d ask a question or make a commentary to which I’d start to answer and about halfway through, my screen would freeze.  The only way to get back in was to start the process over…every damned time.  Once, when I popped back onto the interview, I held up a glass of wine and said, “I’m turning this into a drinking game.  Every time I drop out, I take a drink.”

Barbara grinned at me, held up her own glass of wine and said, “Way ahead of you, kiddo.”

Unfortunately, the connection did not get any better.  Needless to say, the interview was over at a half hour.  Blessedly.

But all in all, this is a lovely place to work.  My home office has a window overlooking our front lawn. If I feel like a stroll, the ocean is a few minutes from the house.  

And now, I must get back to my WIP.  I have a July first deadline for my fifth adventure with Geneva Chase, and yet again, I’m putting the poor woman through hell. 

Ink In Her Veins

 By Thomas Kies

The headline in my county’s Sunday newspaper is “Nothing to See Here”, referring to the efforts of local politicians to get a bill passed eliminating the requirement to post public notices in the paper.  They would like, instead, to post them on the county website.  

Yet another attack on newspapers. 

The protagonist in my Geneva Chase Mystery series is a crime reporter for a small independent newspaper that’s on the brink of being purchased by a media conglomerate.  Geneva is based on several women I’ve worked with over the years when I too worked in the newspaper and publishing business.  

It’s a business that I loved.  I did everything, including working as a pressman on a Goss web press in Detroit, becoming a staff writer, eventually becoming an editor, then moving into advertising management, and ultimately becoming the publisher and general manager of a magazine publishing house here on the coast of North Carolina. 

 I even delivered newspapers during a blizzard in one of the company’s ancient, rear-wheel drive vans.   Yikes.

The business was exciting, interesting, and fun, but filled with the pressures of working on a deadline.  

Unfortunately, the business has changed.  The combination of the Great Recession, the effects of the Internet, and Covid-19 has been disastrous for newspapers.  Their main source of revenue is advertising and all three of the factors I presented have shrunk that revenue stream.  

Before the Great Recession, the housing market was booming.  Real estate companies were spending a fortune in the classified section of newspapers, along with car dealerships, and companies looking to hire employees.  

Starting in 2007-2008, the housing bubble burst followed by cascading disasters in employment and consumer confidence.  Companies who always knew about the Internet, suddenly found it very attractive.  It was cheap and easy to use.  

The lucrative classified pages in newspapers diminished to a disastrous level. The advertising in the main pages of the paper also either got smaller or went away altogether. 

According to a New York Times article in December of 2019, over the past 15 years, more than one in five papers in the United States has shuttered, and the number of journalists working for newspapers has been cut in half, according to research by the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism. That has led to the rise of hollowed-out “ghost papers” and communities across the country without any local paper. “Ghost papers” are publications what have severely cut the staff in their newsrooms making any kind of investigative reporting non-existent. 

Covid-19 has delivered even more pain to newspapers.  When the world shut down in March of 2020, stores, shops, bars, and restaurants all closed their doors for months. Advertising became even scarcer.  Even with the world starting to open back up, the number of pages in your local newspaper has become less and less.  

An unexpected circumstance from the experience of working from home, more newspaper companies are closing their newsrooms, having offsite printing companies produce their publications, and selling their buildings and assets.

A huge part of the joy of working for a newspaper was being with the people you worked with.  Yes, the pressure of daily deadlines could lead to fraying nerves and in-office tension.  But at the end of the day, these people were your “newspaper family”.  Even though I’ve been out of the business for more than ten years, I still stay in close touch with a lot of them even if it’s through social media on the Internet.

Speaking of the Internet, the way people get their news has changed dramatically.

The transition of news from print, television and radio to digital spaces has caused huge disruptions in the traditional news industry, especially the print news industry. It’s also reflected in the ways individual Americans say they are getting their news. A large majority of Americans get news at least sometimes from digital devices, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Aug. 31-Sept. 7, 2020.

More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults (86%) say they get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet “often” or “sometimes,” including 60% who say they do so often. This is higher than the portion who get news from television, though 68% get news from TV at least sometimes and 40% do so often. Americans turn to radio and print publications for news far less frequently, with half saying they turn to radio at least sometimes (16% do so often) and about a third (32%) saying the same of print (10% get news from print publications often).

The point of this rambling blog is that even in fiction, I’m transitioning Geneva Chase, crime reporter, into going freelance, working gigs for her newspaper on occasion, and working for a company called Lodestar Analytics that does open-source research as well as instigating deep dive investigations.  

Personally, I still like newspapers.  I get the paper out of Raleigh every day (even they’ve stopped printing on Saturdays, however) and my local newspaper (which has cut back from three days a week to two), as well as the Sunday New York Times (which seems to be flourishing).

I also subscribe to a digital Washington Post feed and routinely scan other websites (all free) for news from around the globe. I’m a news junkie and the Internet feeds my addiction. 

Still, I’m happiest when I’m writing scenes where Geneva Chase is working in the newsroom.  She’s got ink in her veins. I’d like to think that I do too.

Clickbait ADHD

I know that November is Novel Writing Month, but I can barely write a novel in a year.

Why?

I have the attention span of a six-year-old. That’s a bad thing if you’re writing an 90,000-word mystery. Worse, if you’re working on a computer and you’re logged onto the internet.

First off, I’m a news junkie. Every morning, I look at the websites of the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico, The Hill, Huffington Post, and the Raleigh News & Observer. The current political climate doesn’t do anything to assuage my news addiction. Scary things are happening and an absurd rate of speed.

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If I just read the stories that interested me, I would most likely be fine. But I go for clickbait. Those shiny, sparkly, too good to be true headlines that always promise more that they deliver—suddenly I’m down the rabbit hole. When I should be working on Chapter 23, instead I’m clicking on something that’s caught my eye.

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And how much time on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is too much? I justify it by saying that they’re all marketing tools to help get the word about my books. “Liking” my friends’ photos is just being neighborly. Isn’t it?

After all, they “like” and share the reviews I post of Random Road and Darkness Lane. Facebook and Twitter, well, they're just good marketing tools.

A few years ago, a Chicago psychologist, Michael Pietrus offered an interesting theory: Maybe these distractions aren’t just an internet-age annoyance but something approaching actual pathology.

It's possible the internet is giving us all the symptoms of ADHD. He cautioned, “We are not saying that internet technologies and social media are directly causing ADHD.” But he claimed that the internet “can impair functioning in a variety of ways…that can mimic and in some cases exacerbate underlying attention problems.”

According to the CDC, an estimated 4.4 percent of adults have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It can make it difficult to concentrate on one thing for any period of time. Adults with ADHD, unlike children, aren’t hyperactive in the conventional sense. But they can be compulsive, easily distracted, easily bored. They lose interest halfway through reading an article or completing a task.

When I sit down at my desk on a Saturday morning intending to have two chapters under my belt by the end of the day and I look at my watch and see that it’s already noon and I haven’t written a word—well, that’s when I slap myself in the forehead.

How do I combat my addiction? Believe it or not--YouTube. No, I don’t download kitty videos or trailers of upcoming movies (although I love those) and nor do I download outtakes from the Big Bang Theory (even though I find those laugh-out-loud hilarious).

Nope, I’ll listen to ambient music. There’s a ton of it out there. It’s like the background music in a movie. If I’ve come to a sad chapter, I put on an hour of sad music. If I’m at a place of introspection, I’ll put on an hour or so of a chill mix. Writing a scary scene? There are some ambient style Game of Thrones soundtracks that put me in the right frame of mind.

A 2007 study from Stamford University published in the journal Neuron makes the claim that music engages the areas of the brain linked with paying attention, making predictions and updating memory.

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That’s the last one, I promise. Time to turn on some ambient music and write that novel. www.thomaskiesauthor.com

Point of No Return

This weekend my darling granddaughter, Abigail Bieker, will be graduating from Northern Arizona State University. I'll be driving down with my daughter, her mother Mary Beth, tomorrow. We are so proud of Abby!

A college degree is an enormous advantage in today's economy. What's more, it can't be erased. It's there. Forever.

During historical interviews I've been struck at how much everything has changed. Women from a preceding generation told of canning little jars of beef to take for their food. Casually running home during a semester was unheard of. Rules were strictly enforced and expulsion was a constant threat.

Curfews reigned. Dorms were either men or women. Women were forbidden to ever, I mean ever, visit a man's living quarters. Even sororities locked their doors promptly at certain times every night. Over time the rules were relaxed and dorms yielded to men's floors and women's floor, then even that has given way to shared mixed gender rooms.

Calls home, which often involved party lines, were expensive and traumatic. Imagine chats with the parents with all the neighbors listening in. There were no credit cards, cash was scarce and skimping was a way of life. Friends chipped in a quarter to provide refreshments for a party. There was little relief from constant study.

Libraries were hallowed ground. With no internet available it was essential to devour as many books as possible to do a decent job of writing papers and responding to assignments. It was study, study, study. This was the only time one would have access to this quantity of books.

There has been a sea change globally in about every area, especially in how we do research. Having lived in small towns with limited libraries my gratitude for the internet knows no bounds. I cannot fully express my appreciation. Yet work is work. The young woman slumped over her computer knows this. The internet hasn't erased the need to think, and thinking is hard! The publishing industry is now totally dependent on electronics. A couple of weeks ago I broke my little Surface computer. I bought it in 2012 so it was ancient by current standards. I have a large desktop but it won't do me a bit of good when I'm in Arizona. I need something portable to take with me. I can and do compose in longhand a lot of the time. Especially when it comes to fiction.

But longhand is no good for transmitting documents. My weekend guest post is by the fabulous Tammy Kaehler and she has a wonderful series with Poisoned Pen. I won't be able to send her post before I leave. But the hotel has a business service center.

I've reached the point of no return. It's electronics or perish.