High Anxiety

 By Thomas Kies

When writing a thriller, I’ve been told that you need to keep ramping up the stakes, turn up the heat, and escalate the danger.  But throughout your story, you need to leave some room for your reader to take a breath and rest a moment or you run the risk of exhausting him or her to the point that they have to put your book down. 

We felt like we were at that resting point sometime over the summer.  My wife and I had gotten our vaccinations and the world seemed to be opening up again.  I was able to hold a couple of wildly successful book signings, attend some great functions, and even emcee a couple of events. 

Just seeing people again was exciting.  Back in April, I’d been asked to be the auctioneer at a school fundraiser at a local country club.  Before my part of the evening, we ate dinner and my wife asked, “What’s wrong?  Why are you so quiet?”

I glanced around the room and with a slight shrug I answered, “I’m not used to being in a room with all these people. The last time we were at any kind of event, it was over a year ago."

I managed to shake it off, ham it up, and we raised a ton of money for the school and for the kids.  On the spot, they asked me to come back in 2022.

Things were looking so rosy by October that I signed up for the Suffolk Mystery Writers Festival in March, Malice Domestic in April, and Thrillerfest in June. My wife and I booked a cruise to Alaska in May.

We were vaxxed and boosted and it seemed like the pandemic crisis had abated.

Then the omicron variant showed up.  

The stakes have ramped up, the heat is on, and the danger is escalating.  All bets are off.

It’s like those damned apocalypse movies you see on Netflix.  If everyone would just do what they need to do for self-preservation we’d all be better off.  But with every story, there must be a lunatic fringe.  

I have a reporter friend who had a trip booked for Europe in a few months and he bemoaned what was going on in the world now that omicron was the dominant strain.

I just said, “Plot twist.”

He asked me, “Would people believe all this if you had written it into one of your novels?”

Probably not.

This blog is blessedly brief because I’m writing in on Christmas Day and I really should be downstairs in the kitchen putting together coq au vin for dinner for tonight.

I’m wishing you a belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year with the hopes that our plot twists be few and trivial.

Plot Twists and Being Lucky

By Thomas Kies

One of the topics I teach in my creative writing class at the college is how to write effective plot twists. In many cases it’s a lot like a magic trick. While the audience is paying attention to what the left hand is doing, the right hand is the one making the trick happen.

Covid is like the plot twist that just keeps on giving. 

My book SHADOW HILL launched last August. I’d finished writing the book in April of 2020, but the publication date was pushed back for obvious reasons. Trying to promote a book in the throes of so many people dying in a pandemic was a bad idea.

Once it had been announced that a vaccination had been developed at the beginning of 2021, it gave me hope that I could promote SHADOW HILL as it should. I hoped to be at the usual locations including the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale where I’ve launched every book so far in my writing career.  

About the same time that vaccinations were rolling out, Barnes & Noble made a sizeable commitment to the rerelease of my first book RANDOM ROAD. It was going to be on the front table of every one of their stores. I had visions of going from one B&N to another to do book signings. 

I’d signed up for Bouchercon that was going to take place in New Orleans just in time for the release of SHADOW HILL.

It was all falling into place.

Then…POW…the Delta variant stepped in. Add to that, a confusing and confounding reluctance of a sizable portion of the public to getting a vaccination that's left a high percentage of the population to being ravaged by the disease. 

Just as the world was emerging back into a relative sense of normalcy, it all went wrong. A local restaurant I was due to have a book signing closed when one of their employees was diagnosed with Covid.

We did manage to have a book event at that restaurant two weeks later when everyone tested negative and then we did another book event at a local country club. We sold out of books in both events.  

In the meantime, Bouchercon was cancelled because of Covid fears. Just as well since Hurricane Ida hit the same weekend the conference was supposed to take place. The old double whammy.

Ever optimistic, my fifth book, WHISPER ROOM, is due for publication in August of 2022. I’m scheduled to be at Malice Domestic in April and Thrillerfest in June. That same week, I’m hoping to do a book signing at a library in Norwalk, Connecticut. I’m looking forward to having a book signing at my favorited restaurant here on the coast in August.

The latest plot twist? Omicron, the latest variant of Covid. No telling how bad that’s going to be.

I’m not complaining. I’m really not. So many people have it so much worse.  

Steven Sondheim passed away on Friday and days before he died, he reflected, “I’ve been lucky.”

So have I. My childhood dream was to be a novelist. And I am. I’ve been lucky.

Back when I was working for a newspaper in Connecticut, I had an assignment in Manhattan. A colleague of mine was with me on the Metro-North train into the city. The entire one-hour trip, she whined and complained about pretty much everything under the sun.

When we finally got to Grand Central Terminal, we went straight to the iconic clock in the Main Concourse where we were to meet our contact. We got there early and as we were chatting and people watching, a woman came up to us and asked if we would take a picture of her and her daughter. She said, “This is the first time we’ve been to New York.”

It was difficult to tell how old her daughter was because she was in a wheelchair and her poor little body seemed to be bent at strange angles. It made me want to cry.

In spite of it, they both had huge smiles on their faces. 

The little girl had the biggest grin of the two of them. After we took the photo, the mother thanked us and told us how excited they were to be in the city and how much her daughter had been looking forward to it. 

After they left, my colleague looked at me said, “If I ever bitch about anything again, just slap me.”

So, yes, Covid is sending us another plot twist. But like Steven Sondheim, I’ve been lucky.  www.thomaskiesauthor.com

Off to Malice

Frankie here. Sorry I don't have time to write a post today. I'm rushing to get myself together before heading off to Malice Domestic, the annual mystery conference in the D.C. area. I've had a cold all week, so playing catch-up.

I went down to the City (NYC) for the Edgars banquet last week. Sitting there about to take a bite of my salad, I had a lovely surprise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT8WE_dbijQ

My Week

Reading "My Day," Eleanor Roosevelt's syndicated newspaper column, one can't help but be struck by how she weaves the details of public and private. A description of a family evening seems ordinary until one realizes who the guests were who came to dinner. An account of a trip to the New York City World's Fair with friends leads one to pause and wonder about the security surrounding an event that Mrs. Roosevelt mentions so casually.

I was once asked to write a guest blog about a typical day in the life of my police detective, Hannah McCabe. I have occasionally been asked how I divide my time between my career as an academic and my other life as a mystery writer. Yesterday, as I was thinking about how to fit some designated writing time into my schedule for the rest of the semester, I paused to look not only at my day, but at my week.

My life is lived on a calendar that is never quite in step with people who look at a year and see twelve months. Academic-types look at a calendar and see semesters or quarters or intersessions. We see the times when classes are in session. We are sometimes unaware of holidays when other people have days off because our classes are meeting. We have spring break, and for a week -- as in summer and for almost a month in late December and much of January -- we may be working at home. We have "flexible" schedules in that we have work to get done, but are generally free to come and go unless we have a class or office hours or a committee meeting. Having such an undefined "work day," we often carry around papers to be graded or books to be read and end up in errand-to-do places with computers open. Think waiting room at the car dealership while oil being changed and tires rotated.

Next week is spring break for the students at UAlbany. This week was mid-term week -- a marvelous way to send them off with a sigh of relief that the first half of the semester is over and nagging anxiety about how well they did on the exam. I had two classes this week. Crime and Cities, a grad course, on Monday afternoon, 1:15-4:05. Violence in American literature, a 400-level, writing-intensive, course from 5:45-8:35 on Tuesday evening. Late evening classes are a recent addition in my school, and we take turns teaching them. The idea is that it allows students who are unable to take a class during the day to register for an evening class. What I've discovered is that I spend much of my day knowing that I'll need to teach in the evening and not getting too involved in anything else.

On Monday, I went into Crime and Cities feeling confident that my grad students would remember the discussions we'd had about the evolution of American cities from colonies to early 20th century cities. They had read, watched videos, discussed in class and their online journals the role of commerce in the establishment of the colony of New Amsterdam (where Peter Stuyvesant, the director general banned knife fights and fined failure to attend church) and Chicago (where location was everything, Mrs. O'Leary's cow was wrongly accused, and Henry Ford took note of the dis-assembly line used to butcher hogs). After the last student had finished her exam, I dashed back to my office to leave the exams on my desk and then hurried to the uptown campus (10 minutes away) to attend a meeting. I had already said I would be late (the problem when meetings have to be scheduled based on availability of the majority of attendees on two campuses). I got there in time to settle into my seat before the presenter was too far along. A bottle of water was waiting on the conference table, always welcome after a hike from one of the parking lots. I headed home after the meeting and spent the evening working on my Tuesday exam (while watching "The Voice").

Tuesday stands out as a high point in my week because a library director cc'd me on an email she sent out to the librarians in her system. The email was about me. She was letting them know that the three-volumes that co-editor, Steve Chermak, and I had edited on Crimes of the Century had made Library Journal's list of "Best of 2016" reference book. I zipped off a quick thank you for the news and sent an email to my co-editor. We did the email equivalent of a "high-five," both pleased that a project that had been so labor-intensive had turned out more than okay in the end. He suggested I email the editor we work with as co-series editors for crime and media and let her know. I also sent an email to my agent, who had nothing to do with the project, but I like to let him know when something good happens.

Tuesday evening I gave another exam. My undergrad students tackled multiple choice questions, true or false, matching, and the two essays questions of their choice. They felt more confident about the essay questions because they had made them up the week before. I caught up on the news on my podium computer while they wrote about Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," Dunbar's "The Lynching of Jube Benson," and Glaspell's "Trifles" and "A Jury of Her Peers". We wished each other good spring breaks as they deposited their exams on the table and headed out one by one. 

On Wednesday, I looked at the two stacks of exams on my desk and considered when I would start grading. I wanted to finish before spring break begins so that I would have an entire, uninterrupted week to work on my dress, appearance, and crime book. I also needed to do a draft of a proposal for a conference in Spring 2018 and send it off to my collaborator in a community project. I needed to read a manuscript that I had been asked to review by an academic publisher. I needed to finish reading  Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor's memoir, My Beloved World, because I'm distributing copies of the book to my graduate class when they return after spring break. Justice Sotomayor is coming to campus on April 4 to give a public lecture.


During the day, the supervisor of our three-volume project sent congratulations on Library Journal. I glanced around at the stacks of articles that I'd read and printed out for my dress and appearance book. I debated whether -- since my one office window was going to be covered with green netting until July while renovations were going on -- I might actually pack up some of the boxes and spend more time working at home. I decided working in a gloomy office where no sunshine penetrated was probably easier than concentrating when a 16 pound cat decides he wants to set on your lap as you're writing. Besides I had tried that during the summer and the books I needed was always at school.

On Thursday, I confirmed that I would be on a panel during spring break if the organizer really needed me. I made a note to myself to rent the documentary that I would need to watch. Earlier, I'd remembered that I hadn't made my hotel reservation for Malice Domestic. I called the hotel and had a few tense moments on hold that turned out to be about the computer not a full hotel. I'd called my doctor's office to make an appointment to get my ear checked -- clogged since I'd had a cold -- and needed to scramble for my appointment book when the receptionist surprised us both by saying she could fit me in on Friday. I spent the evening, thinking about what I want to accomplish next week -- and realizing I need to get as much done up front as possible. A week goes by in the blink of an academic eye.

This morning -- or late last night -- I decided to write about how I'd spent my week. I'm thinking of keeping a daily journal to help me find more time to write every day. I'm going to see if setting aside a couple of hours a day to work on the 1939 book will get me through the first draft.

Just realized this post is really long -- but no time to edit. A meeting at 1. 

Hair Today Gone Tomorrow

A few weeks ago, I was fed up with my hair. When it gets long enough the natural curl falls out and then I have to "do something" with it. Since I happened to be sitting in a hair salon looking in the mirror when I realized I was tired of trying to duplicate what my hair stylist did at home, I said, "Let's cut it really short." He did while I watched my hair falling to the tile floor and wondered if I had made a mistake. This was not the first time I had gone for really short -- as in about an inch back and sides and only a bit more on top. I have done it in the summer, I have done it in the winter. And every time I do it, I think "What am I doing? Good grief, I'll have to put on lipstick and earrings so it looks like I'm at least "trying" (i.e., to be attractive). When I was about twenty years younger, I didn't have to try so hard and my short cut always went over well. Now, it just displays the gray at my temples. So this time, before we cut, I asked if we could add highlights. In theory, this distracts from any gray that is prone to resist coloring and brightens ones appearance. My hairstylist and the woman in the next chair and her hairstylist all assured me that it did. And looking in the mirror, I was pleased at having gotten a little crazy with my color this time around. Next time, I'm going to do purple instead of red. I have decided that if I can't beat the gray which is always back at my temples within days of coloring, that I'm going to have fun. Actually, gray is "in" right now. Young women are dying their hair gray. But if I did, people would just assume it was natural.

So what does this have to do with writing? Well, if you read my last post about feet, you know that I said I'd write about heads next time. I am in the process of doing some research on how mystery writers handle dress and appearance in their books. I've been thinking about those concise descriptions that some writers can do so well. The shoes on the feet, the hat on the head that immediately brings a character to life. Of course, there are the clothes -- or lack of them -- between feet and head. And saying that a character has short hair or no hair or was wearing a baseball cap may leave the reader with the wrong mental image. A reader who wears her hair to her shoulders may think of "short hair" as a chin-length bob. Another reader who is losing his hair may imagine a character with "no hair" has gone bald rather than shaved his head. A baseball cap might declare allegiance to a sports team, been purchased from a street stand to keep the sun off, have a company logo or refer to the wearer's profession or hobby, might be worn pulled down low over the eyes or turned backward. The cap might be turned backward because the wearer, clad in white overalls, is painting a wall in her house. A baseball cap might be accompanied by sagging pants, running togs, or white dress with open collar (really cool CEO). Or it might be worn awkwardly by a politician in a suit and tie.

Men are much less likely to wear hats these days than in the past. We most often see hats on male celebrities who are making a style statement as they walk the red carpet or appearing on a TV show like "The Voice" (e.g., celebrity judge Pharrell Williams who likes hats). But in crime films and mystery/detective novels, hats have been an important accessory. Sherlock Holmes has his deerstalker. Hercule Poirot has his bowler. A hat was indispensable to James Cagney's look as a Prohibition-era gangster in The Public Enemy. Even as he staggers along in the pouring rain after being shot and finally falls down in the street, his hat stays firmly on his head. And no one wore a fedora like Humphrey Bogart. Add trench coat in Casablanca, and we have iconic movie style.

I plucked a couple of books off my shelf as I was writing this post. In Ceremony (1982), featuring Robert B. Parker's Boston PI, Spenser tells us that Hawk, his African American side kick, has attracted attention outside the Copley Plaza Hotel. Hawk is 6'2" and he is "wearing a glistening black leather jacket and skintight leather jeans." Spenser concludes his description of the reactions of those keeping their distance as they pass with this observation, "He wore no hat and his smooth black head was as shiny as his jacket and [black cowboy] boots." Of course, if Hawk had been wearing a hat, he might have looked even more intimidating to passers-by. And one wonders what hat, the always sartorially-aware Hawk, might have worn with a leather jacket, tight jeans, and cowboy boots. In Michael Connelly's Void Moon (2000), his protagonist, Cassie Black, a beautiful ex-con, is introduced to a man  named Lankford at a car dealership. The man, who is looking at "the silver Carrera with the whale tail spoiler," is wearing "a porkpie hat". A few paragraphs later, Cassie "turned her attention to Lankford. He was neat and well dressed in a set of retro clothes that went with the hat."

I am fascinated by hats and hair and shapes of heads. Some people can wear hats, and others would do better not to try. I grew up wanting to wear hats with the style and flair of church-going women on Sunday morning. I have been in awe of those hat-wearing women at the Kentucky Derby -- or, occasionally, hat wearers at Malice Domestic, the mystery conference. But if I were writing myself as a character in one of my books, I would leave my head hatless. And somehow I would work in the photos of my changing hair over the years that mark both era and mood and sometimes desperation -- from Afro to straight from long to short. Always worn "natural" now. If I were a character walking into the party I once attended after being caught in the rain, my hair would be clinging to my head when I arrived and a puff of curls and waves after I had retreated to the bathroom to try to dry it.

Hats on, hats off, head bald or covered with hair or wig. From "hat honor" (hat removed to show deference) that was a matter of theology for the early Quakers to hat-making that might have affected the "Mad Hatter" to a baseball cap worn in a classroom in defiance of a dress code or while holding up a liquor store, hats have been an accessory worth thinking about. So has the hair or lack of it underneath. Something to think about as we decide if a character will wear a black hat or a white one, throw his "hat into the ring" or depart with "hat in hand."