My first memory is of riding a horse at the family ranch. I believe I was about three. I am sitting in front of my uncle Todd on a dark horse, I remember the black mane. We are loping alongside a dirt road that led from the main ranch to the lower barn. My parents are driving in their two tone gold and white sedan (this would have been 1960) along the bumpy road. From my seat on the horse they appear small, far beneath my lordly height. They wave to me.
I remember the wind and the flying dark mane and the rhythm of the lope, the sense of power and speed and freedom. I remember feeling both literally and symbolically above my parents in the car. We were going FASTER than the car. I was on a horse. I do not know if I was obsessed with horses before this moment, but I certainly was afterwards. I can chronicle my life through horses from this point forward.
I don’t have a photo of that early ride; I do have a photo of a moment that I don’t remember. My uncle was selling a pony named Tarbaby, and apparently I was placed on the pony to show how gentle he was. The notation below the photo indicates that I was two years, three months. I certainly look happy. The back of the photo reads, “Pony For Sale.”

After this my horse memories become random. I remember once being at the lower barn with my father (who was no horseman). Again, I would have been three or four. My uncle had a sorrel horse tied to a hitching rail. I must have begged to sit on the horse, though I don’t remember this. I do remember my father asking my uncle if he could put me on the horse. And all these many years later, I remember the hesitant tone in my uncle’s voice as he said, “Sure.” And I remember him quickly stepping up to untie the horse (good move). I sat happily on that horse for a few moments and then was put down again. End of story. But I wonder if that horse was all that gentle.

My uncle only occasionally made time to put me up on his horses. But I helped him feed, if I was allowed to, and I just plain followed him around whenever I could. By the time I was six or seven, I knew all his “regular” horses by name. Since my uncle was something of a horse trader, there were horses that came and went. But Lad, the gentle brown gelding with the blaze face, was a good rope horse and a permanent resident. I was sometimes allowed to ride Lad, when my uncle had time to supervise. There was Dutch, who had to be put down due to a broken leg. And when I was about eight years old, my uncle bought a wonderful horse named Mr Softime.
I don’t have any photos of Mr Softime, but I remember him perfectly. A bright bay with no white and a big kind eye. Softime was an ex-racehorse, an appendix bred QH, which means half TB and bred to run. In short, he was a hot horse, and only four years old. I was not allowed to ride him—for many years. But I hung around his corral and fed him grass all day, if nobody ran me off. Many years later I bought Burt, pictured below, because he reminded me of Softime.

As I got older, I learned to ride—because I insisted on it. My parents had no interest in horses, but I pestered my uncle, and I begged my parents for riding lessons, which they somewhat grudgingly agreed to. I rode English at a local riding school and learned to jump. But my heart was always with the cowboys.
Once I could ride tolerably well (at about eleven or twelve), my uncle let me ride his rope horses and his trading horses. And thus I grew up riding a wide selection of horses, some of whom were quite willing to buck and bolt and rear, let alone spook and be what English riders call “very forward.” I rode them all. But Lad, with his big white blaze, and a sorrel horse named Tovy were the two steady Eddies who stayed until they died and carried me on many of my childhood horseback adventures.
And I had my share of adventures. We used to slide the horses down the fifty foot sawdust piles at the old ranch and jump them over handmade jumps created out of pallets and crates, and when I was fourteen I regularly rode Lad solo through the hills and down the suburban streets—usually bareback. At fifteen I was allowed to buy my own horse (with my hard earned money) and for $175 (cheap even then) I bought a recalcitrant bay gelding named Jackson.
Jackson had many faults and few virtues. The virtues were that he was sound and cheap and an OK trail horse. The faults were that he was ill broke and stubborn, willing to kick and rear and not particularly cooperative about anything. But I was fifteen and I thought I was tough and I rode this critter solo through the hills and down busy roads and often swam him across the San Lorenzo River (again solo—I have no idea what my parents were thinking or if perhaps they secretly wished to be rid of me). Once when I was saddling Jackson by myself at the small shack of a barn behind our neighbor’s house where I kept him, he kicked me in the head and knocked me out. When I came to, I finished saddling him and went riding. I never told my parents.
Eventually I figured out that Jackson was not much of a deal and I sold him to the local riding school. I was all of nineteen and I had an even BETTER idea than buying another ill-broke backyard horse. I would buy an unbroken colt and train it myself(!)
Never mind that I had never actually trained a horse myself. I had ridden plenty of green horses and I had survived Jackson—what could go wrong?
So did I buy a gentle colt, carefully chosen for me by my experienced uncle? Well, no. I bought a completely untouched four-year-old mare with very hot bloodlines, and this choice was Ok’d by my experienced uncle. In retrospect I’m pretty sure he must have wanted to be rid of me, too.
Honey, the mare, was a handful. She was also a very “marish” mare. Pretty much put me off mares for life. And really, she would have been a difficult project for an experienced horseman. She barely knew how to lead when I got her and she was in the fall of her four-year-old year and as full of herself as a horse can get.
I got her broke. I didn’t die. But by the time she was five and was reasonably safe to ride, I had learned that she did not love me and I did not love her. So I sold her and bought a very cute 5 year old green broke gelding who was for sale cheap. I was in college by then and I took this horse, Hobby, off to school with me.
Hobby was cute, but stubborn. I found out very soon why I had been able to afford this horse. He bolted whenever he felt like it, and nothing, including pulling his nose around and dallying the rein to the saddle horn, would stop him. He just ran until he fell down.
A year of this and I had him cured of most of his bad habits, but once again, I was sick of him. I sold him to a woman who kept him the rest of his life and taught her kids to ride on him (and they won a bunch on him in the show ring), so I guess I did an OK job with his training. But I wanted a forever horse. One that I really liked. And then came Burt.

(to be continued)

PS—For those who may wonder what the heck horses might have to do with this blog, my mystery series has an equine vet for a protagonist and is very horse-themed. I like to let readers know that I come by my knowledge of horses quite honestly. No internet research involved here (!)

And then there’s the smaller consideration: how many typos did I miss and how many clunky sentences did I fail to fix?

But now I’m trapped in my own past. My new ebook publisher—BooksBNimble—is doing the Jake Samson books as well as Blackjack and I’ve been proofing. This week I’m reading through Samson’s Deal, the first one in the series. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I had a memory that it wasn’t very good. My first effort in the genre. Almost my first book. How embarrassed would I have to be if my students read it?

Cringing, which is very hard to do when you’re sitting at a keyboard, I peeked inside.

Would the characters be ridiculous? Would the plot be weak? My questions were beginning to sound like someone singing “My Funny Valentine.” When you open it to speak, are you smart?

Only one thing I found embarrassing. Over and over again I committed the crime I warn my students about. Word repetition. The old “I guess that’s your favorite word, huh?” problem. So if you read it, or reread it, forgive me for that.  

But still, I began to enjoy myself. Literally. The self of quite a few years ago. And Jake the alter ego. And Rosie. His cats Tigris and Euphrates and her standard poodle Alice B. Toklas. The house and cottage where they lived, my old house and cottage in Oakland. A time machine that took me back to there and then. And the book was pretty good, too, much to my relief. Not to toot my own horn. Isn’t that a wonderful expression? Must go back to medieval trumpeters.

I digress. The book doesn’t go back that far. Quite. But it was a world without cell phones, personal computers, supermarket chains selling organic food. A world where long-hairs and commie-baiters faced off and you had to stop at a pay phone to make a call and you couldn’t Google anything.

Maybe I should think of it as a historical mystery.

My Grandmother, when she was 22

Roslindale, Massachusetts, where I spent some of my earliest years, she had a wonderful large rectangular rose garden, with a circular brick path in the middle that I loved to run around. I also loved to fill jars with the Japanese beetles that ravaged those roses – and pull off their legs.

So — her garden wasn’t entirely a romantic experience. At least for the Japanese beetles. 

After my grandfather retired, my grandparents shared a home with my parents in New Jersey in the winter months, but, in the summer, they all shared the home in Maine where I live now. My grandparents would head for Edgecomb as soon as they deemed it warm enough — usually in early April — so they could start gardening. They installed a kidney-shaped iris garden near the porch, and a large garden near the barn which included raspberry bushes, vegetables, and flowers. The raspberries were especially important to them since during the hard days of the Depression when they’d lived in New York City they’d dreamed of being able to grow and eat raspberries.

My grandmother would get up early to “beat the birds to the berries,” and lay the damp, ripe red raspberries she’d picked on cookie sheets to dry on card tables at one end of our kitchen. Later in the day they’d be turned into raspberry pies or shortcakes — or, if not perfect, jams, jellies, or syrups for the winter months. Tomatoes were canned. Mint became mint jelly for winter lamb. And, of course, we had fresh flowers all summer, and fresh salads, and vegetables for the table. I helped to some extent by weeding and picking berries and vegetables and stirring sauces and straining jellies, but my mother and grandmother did most of the work. By the time I was old enough to make a major contribution I was assigned to lawn mowing, and by fourteen I had a summer job as well.  But the garden, and its products, were all part of our summers in Maine.

When I had my first home in New Jersey I, too, had a garden. I planted daffodil bulbs in the fall because I loved spring flowers, and I grew vegetables and a few annuals in the summer. I was a single parent, and the vegetables helped with my budget as well as being fun to grow.  The snow peas seldom made it to my stir fries: my daughters ate them off the vines.  I loved that.  Somehow, despite working full-time and studying for my doctoral comps, I remember canning tomatoes until the wee hours of the night (or morning,) and being proud of the line of canned tomatoes and tomato sauce on the shelves lining the steps to our basement.

One year a lot of tomatoes ripened just as we were to leave for our Maine vacation. Not wanting to lose that fruit, I packed two grocery bags full of ripe or near-ripe tomatoes, put them on the passenger seat next to me, the children in the back seat, and headed north. I figured I’d make tomato sauce in Maine. 

It was a hot July day. As we drove through New Jersey and New York traffic, the tomatoes kept ripening. And, as I took a sharp right exit  turn onto the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut … both bags of tomatoes fell.  Sideways.  Onto me. 

To shrieks of delight from my daughters, I found myself driving the remaining six hours to Maine covered with smashed, ripe tomatoes. In our family, that turn will forever be known as “the tomato turn.”

It turned out that was my last garden. I moved again, to a larger house, when my family grew, but although I started a garden there, nothing grew. We were on a hill, and there was little topsoil. 

Daffodils in Lea’s Yard Today

 The lawn was mostly moss, and even my daffodils didn’t grow, although every year I persistently planted more bulbs. 

So when I finally was able to move to Maine full-time, I knew one thing I wanted to do was bring back the gardens. They had long since disappeared; there’d been no one to take care of them since my grandparents died so, gradually, they’d been taken over by lawn. I hired someone with a tractor and started again. I planted vegetables, and flowers. That first year I was busy, writing, and taking care of my mother, and didn’t give the garden the care it needed. The flowers survived to some extent. The vegetables provided fodder for various types of insects and the local woodchuck. But I discovered, to my delight, that the violets and johnny jump-ups that my grandmother had loved appeared, as though by magic, in the places she had planted them, so many years before.  

And in the fall I planted daffodils.

And they bloomed in the spring.

Violets Along the Path

I soon realized my writing and my family were more important to me than my garden so it, too, is now gone; all that is left now is the slate path I laid that first year. The daffodils delight me every spring, and I add to them regularly. 

But every year, near that slate path in the grass, the violets come back, reminding me that my grandmother lived her dream here, in this house; in this yard. She wanted a garden, with raspberries. And she made that happen.

I, too, had a dream. I wanted to write. And I’m making that happen. Her violets are here as witnesses. I don’t think she’d be disappointed that I haven’t continued her garden. I think she’d like that this house is still a place where dreams come true.

Weiner explained his reckless behavior by saying he craved adulation, friends,  attention, and relentlessly sought them all via Facebook and Twitter. It was a sobering story and I think it has some lessons for us as authors.

When I published my first book, there was no Internet that we could search to see how our books were doing and where our careers might be headed.  There were reviews in print, and that was it.  By a certain point after a book was published, there wasn’t much to read anymore about yourself or your book, unless you were touring and there were interviews or features along the way.

Today, we’re drowning in information.  Maureen Dowd put it cleverly in the Times: “Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody’s talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.”

And we authors now have endless opportunities to make ourselves miserable by insatiably reading every last Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads review; checking whether our Facebook author page is getting likes; worrying about whether our tweets will get re-tweeted; obsessing over comments on our blogs; setting up Google alerts for every mention of our names and books; worrying that our web sites aren’t getting enough traffic.  Some authors, begging for attention, even go overboard and live too much of their lives in social media, recording every twitch of consciousness as if the fate of publishing depended on it.  Their neediness–however disguised–is epic and sometimes pathetic.

What we do as authors is so very different from politicians, and we spend so much more time alone.  But that’s exactly what makes the Internet as seductive  for us as it is for them.  It’s a drug we should all worry about relying too heavily on, at the expense of our work.  Increasing how many followers we have on Twitter or friends on Facebook shouldn’t be more important than making ourselves better writers.

Like almost everyone in today’s busy world, however, I‘m part of the problem. I type my novels on a computer and I e-mail. I do write thank-you notes when appropriate, and I send cards for various occasions often including a sentence or two if the person is special to me and I haven’t found the right card. More often than not, I just sign my name. But I have saved letters or rather, my mother saved letters and cards and I inherited them.

Prior to my selling my New Jersey home several years ago, I had to go through the mountain of boxes and paraphernalia that had accumulated in our attic over the many years that we had lived there. In a little black suitcase that I’d taken from my mother’s apartment after her death, I discovered a treasure trove of letters, photographs, and cards for all occasions. Some were letters my siblings and I had written to her from wherever we found ourselves—camp, college, or in later years, Europe. A few were from my children. But the most poignant for me were the letters and cards that my father had sent or given my mother both before and after they were married. Theirs was a love story that ended far too soon.

My father died when I was fourteen so my memory of him has dimmed. I do recall that after his death, people referred to him not only as a gentleman, but as a gentle man. These letters have given me insight into the father that I, as an adult, never had the chance to know, but I now know where my love of writing came from. They say that one person in a relationship always loves a little more than the other which may or may not be true. But in the case of my parents I believe it was my father, or at least he had the greater ability to put his feelings into words. Every card to my mother had a loving note or poem appended and this was true until the day he died.

In one letter in their “courting” days he wrote of his attempt to give up smoking, an inconsequential example perhaps, but I’m sure he was doing it to please my mother because in those years the public had not been made aware of the dangers of smoking. (I know how she felt about the habit, though, because she brainwashed my sister and me into believing that women who smoked look like dragons!) Sadly, as disciplined as my dad was, he never succeeded in quitting. He smoked all of his life which undoubtedly contributed to his early death of a heart attack.

And I may be wrong about who loved who more. My mother was a beautiful woman but she never remarried. She wasn’t an easy person to please and that may have been a factor, but I believe the bar had been set too high. No man was ever going to fill my father’s shoes.

We are all individuals but there’s much, along with our physical appearance and talents that I believe we inherit from our parents. In the process of my cleaning out closets, I found a small box on the top shelf of the closet in my bedroom. I’m rather embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t looked on that shelf (or attempted to dust it) since we had bought the house when my children were small. To my surprise, it contained photos and letters from my high school days. In it were twenty very moving letters from a young man I’d met at a house party at Cornell where my sister went to college. We’d dated on and off for several months before I went off to college in Pittsburgh and he went into the military.

Life is funny. Was I destined to find those letters after so many years? What unseen hand had led me to that box? Why didn’t I just toss it? All I can tell you is that today I am living in California and I’m living with this man. I also plan to write letters again. Not often and not to just anyone but I’m sure I must have something memorable to say that’s worth my children getting teary over when I’m gone in the way far off distant future. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll just write something wonderful on their birthday cards.

Often “it’s the best story anyone has ever heard;” it’s so sensational, she’s going to have to hide while you write it. It will be on the bestseller list quicker than you can say Ghost Writer in the Sky.

Recently a man approached me in a library as our panel of authors was getting ready.

“I’m a political prisoner,” he said, “and I know things that I really can’t tell anyone.” He then told me everything he could in the few minutes before show time. “I’m going to let you write this story,” he said. Apparently I’m the only one in the world he can trust. Or maybe I look like I’m desperate for ideas.

Sometimes I feel guilty not jumping on these proffered projects, but it’s all I can do to manage my own ideas. Maybe there should be software that takes random ideas and works them into a book. Maybe there already is.

What few people seem to realize is that writers have more ideas than anything else. More ideas than time, more ideas than computer paper, certainly more ideas than money. We have ideas in our file cabinets, in notebooks all over the house, and on the notepads by our beds. Some of the ideas take up many pages in an old file; others fit on post-its in the bathroom. We see story possibilities everywhere, especially when things go wrong.

I found a story in a particularly frustrating period in my town. What was supposed to be a 9-month beautification project of our downtown, turned into a 2+-year traffic and torn up nightmare. It became impossible to drive down the main street and to park anywhere near the shops. One of my favorite shops, a crafts store where I’d bought supplies and held book launches and take-away parties, closed.  I miss it, but I used my disappointment as the stuff of my latest novel for PP: “Madness in Miniature,” due spring 2014. In the book, small shops are put out of business by a SuperStore. Details are fictional, but the story is true!

A photo I saw in passing is my latest inspiration: This 1922 photo shows “cow shoes,” used by Moonshiners in the Prohibition days to disguise their footprints.

I’m on it.

I think I have the creds to write this story: my grandfather was arrested for moonshining (the practice went on long after Prohibition ended). At the time I was in high school and utterly embarrassed when Marco Minichino’s name appeared in the newspaper. Now, it’s just a story idea.

The book will feature a number of characters that readers have seen in earlier books in the series, including members of Jeri’s extended family.

I am also in the process of creating some new characters to people my book. Two of those new characters are named Lance and Becca. I’m writing the scene where Jeri talks with Lance. Becca has not yet appeared, but she’s about to walk into the scene.

Lance and Becca. Who do you see when you read those two names?

The people you visualize may not be the people described to Jeri by another character. Or the people Jeri sees when she finally meets them.

It’s up to me, the writer, to add the details. Hair color and style, clothing and shoes, facial features, physical movements, psychological quirks, and backstories. It’s not just a matter of what they look like or the spaces they inhabit. How do they relate to the other characters in the book? What role do they play in the plot?

When I create characters out of those two names, I want the reader to see the people that Jeri sees, people who may well be concealing something of themselves from Jeri.

Bringing Lance and Becca to life got me thinking about how I create characters.

When I first began writing about my protagonist, Oakland private investigator Jeri Howard, I kept detailed notes on how she looks and the clothes and shoes she prefers to wear. I even visualized the apartment where she lived when I began the series, using the floor plan of an apartment I’d once looked at in the Adams Point section of Oakland, near Lake Merritt. Later in the series, when Jeri buys a small house in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood, I used another real floor plan, that of the house bought by an acquaintance. I know how Jeri furnishes these places and of course I know all about her cats.

Writing about an environment I can see helps me create characters. I do a lot of location research, all the better to see my characters in the world I create for them. It could be as simple as a drive through Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood, looking for a likely home for an ex-con mechanic named Acey Collins, in Take A Number. Or visiting a house in Mendocino, on California’s north coast, inhabited by a character in A Credible Threat.

Or riding trains for Death Rides the Zephyr.

Much of the action I’m writing now takes place in Petaluma, in Sonoma County, an hour or so north of San Francisco. It’s familiar territory. I have friends who live there. In fact, every few months a group of fellow writers and I meet in Petaluma for lunch.

Small wonder that the scene I’m writing now, with Lance and the soon-to-show-up Becca, takes place just down the block from the restaurant where we meet for our writerly lunches.

You see, the surroundings say something about the characters I’m crafting.

And so do names.

How would you see Lance and Becca if I told you I’ve changed their names to George and Carrie?

Whether we bring about our fate by exercising free will, or whether it’s all written in stone, or on the wind, doesn’t really matter. It’s gonna happen. I don’t know if the stars and planets have anything to do with fate, but I’m guessing probably not. Is fate just a sequence of silly accidents that pop and fizzle throughout time and space? I don’t think so. I also don’t believe there’s a Big Dude in the sky charting it all out with a quill pen and papyrus, or may stone tablets, or maybe a golden abacus with pearl buttons, or maybe a giant Excel spreadsheet, spread out all over the firmament. Is fate merely the inevitable result of how a bunch of vulnerable dominos were set up sometime during the Big Bang, so that how we fare and how we die are just the consequences of the laws of chemistry and physics, constant and fair throughout the universe? Who knows? Who, for that matter, has time to care?

Fate is a fact of life, the way of the world, and the human condition. But these definitions are too limiting, because the inevitable and interconnected march we’re all on, plodding or racing into the future, also affects other living beings; other gasses, liquids, and solids that may not contain what we self-importantly call life; and other places in the vast universe, hot spots and cold spots where change may be wildly different phenomena. Fate happens out there, too.

Was fate established by an intelligent designer? Nope. Fate just is, always was, and, chances are, always will be. Whether or not it is propelled by intelligent design is a giant can of wriggling worms that I don’t care to open.

Fate is a matter of fact.

Moving on, fate is also an essential ingredient of the man-made microcosm of existence that we call fiction. We writers have every right to call ourselves the creators of our model-size universes. And we plot our stories using intelligent design. Or if we’re not plotters, we at least hold the reins intelligently. And we get to rewrite and revise, which is something even the mythical Big Dude can’t do.

However we think of fate when we talk about the real world, we can get better handle on it when we make up our stories, based on how we understand the laws of fairness and irony that define the stories in human culture.

The concept of fate is essential to storytelling and fiction writing. And one thing to know, one rule to follow or disobey at your own peril is: Dire predictions come true.

This is true in drama: Chekhov told us that when a rifle is hanging over the fireplace in Act One, that rifle must go off before the final curtain comes down. And when rifles are discharged on stage, someone’s going to get hurt.

The rule works in movies, too. If a character you love starts to cough from some illness, you’d better get out the Kleenex, because chances are that character won’t live long enough to read the credits.

Fate was essential to Greek tragedy. When an oracle tells King Laius that his infant son will one day kill him, he and his wife cripple the child and leave him to die on a mountaintop. Does the infanticide work? No way. The kid grows up, comes back to town, unwittingly kills his dad, and I won’t say what he does to his mom.

In the fairy tale, when the spiteful fairy godmother predicts that the infant princess Briar Rose will, on her sixteenth birthday, prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall asleep for a hundred years, there’s no point in the King’s ordering that all the spinning wheels in town be burned. He’s be better off shopping for a good mattress.

And when the soothsayer advises Julius Caesar to beware the ides of March, he’s not really telling Caesar to call in sick on the fifteenth. What he’s saying is, “Dude. Better get your affairs in order, because come the sixteenth, you’ll no longer be wearing sandals.”

So, in fiction as in fact, it’s pointless to try to outsmart fate. The house always wins. To buck fate is to engage in hubris, and the penalty for hubris is always a most unwelcome irony. The so-called Higher Power named Fate shrugs and thunders, “Told ya so.” Of course in real life we can’t help fighting to survive (as we usually should); and because our fiction is about the human condition, our characters are likely to try to beat the odds, even if all they can hope for is a temporary respite.

There is a big difference, however, between human fate in fiction and human fate in fact. The fate of a character in a story ends with the words “The End.” An extension is allowed in the event of a sequel, and of course as long as the story remains in print or remains on shelves or on the Internet, the character’s fate is still accessible and knowable, but that fate is a done deal. The character may rest in peace.

In what we like to call “real life,” a person’s fate does not end with the words “rest in peace.” Death is part of the fate of each of us, but it rarely means the story is over. Because most of us, for better or for worse, are entitled to, or saddled with, an afterlife. No, the afterlife of which I speak has nothing to do with pearly gates and golden slippers, or with brimstone and pitchforks. The afterlife that is part of our lingering fate is made up largely of memories stored by friends and family; of tales told about us if we’re in any sense famous; and of DNA passed along for generations to come, for as long as human beings populate the planet, which may sound like quite a spell but is only a blip in the time span that is eternity. The point is: our lives may end but our presence remains and dwindles for a long time before it fizzles and whimpers into oblivion.

I think what makes us writers write and wish to be read is to keep our fates in progress for a while after we die. And why do we write as beautifully as we can while we are still in partnership with our fates? That’s probably the moral to this discussion: we all, willy-nilly, leave tracks in the sand. We don’t want to be remembered for ugly, obnoxious, lazy, antisocial tracks that stink of plastic litter, broken glass, and shit. No. Let us be remembered for having given the world something of value. If we have any influence over our fate, let it be this.

Our favorite harbinger of spring, that round robin.

Time once again for our rotund avian friend, the Round Robin. This time the Perseverance Press authors discuss social media. Love it, hate it, somewhere in between, it’s still part of the business of writing. Here’s are a few questions for our PP writers (and our web maven Sue Trowbridge), and their responses, regarding social media and how they use it.

Which platforms are you using or dabbling, or dipping your toes? Do you find it useful? Is it a major time suck? Why do you like it? What turns you off? Would you include blogging with things like Facebook and Twitter, or is it something else entirely?

Lea Wait: Although I’ve grown to look at all my contacts with potential readers as marketing, I do categorize types of contacts differently. For me there are two kinds of blogging. One is the regular, getting-to-know you, blog, where you have repeat readers; the others is the “pleased-to-meet-you” cocktail party guest blog where you in effect leave your calling card/book mark and hope the reader remembers you or checks out your book. I blog with Perseverance, of course. I also blog regularly (3-4 times a month + group blogs on Sundays) with www.mainecrimewriters.com). I do guest blogs or interviews perhaps 1-2 times a month.

The only other social media I do is Facebook. I don’t have an Author page. I only have about 2300 “friends” so I’m not near needing one, and I think most people like the idea of being a “friend” instead of a “fan” – although they don’t call it a “fan page” any more. I probably spend a couple of hours a day on FB. I post all my blogs there, and other blogs of my friends. I write short reviews of books I enjoy. I comment on life in Maine, on events I’m involved with, and on what I’m writing. I also comment a lot on my friends’ posts – from wishing them happy birthday to liking their cat and baby photos and so forth. I do try to be their “friend” – not just an author who posts about her writing. I think it pays off when I have a new book out. At first it felt awkward – now I actually enjoy it.  Plus it’s a way to keep in touch with actual long lost friends and relatives.

I haven’t gotten involved with any of the other social media, although people have tried to talk me into Twitter and Pinterest. At the moment, one “time suck” a day is plenty – plus the blogging. If I added up the number of hour a week I spent blogging and FBing . . . it would be a lot.

Laura Crum: I have been blogging for five years at the equestrianink blogspot and have found it a very effective way to reach potential readers of my horse-themed mystery series. Since the readers of this blog are interested in horses and writing about horses, it is very much my target audience. My backlist is now up on Kindle and it is easy for me to see the bumps in sales when I do a promotion through the blog. So I would say that it is very useful. I also enjoy the discussions with other horse bloggers. Since I don’t like to take the time away from home/family to do physical book tours, etc, the blogging has been a great tool for me, enabling me to both find new readers and connect with fans.

I’ve been using Facebook for just over a year. I resisted it for a long time, because I knew (and I was right) that it would be addictive for me and a major time suck, as you say. However, it does work. On my last Kindle promotion, many “friends” shared the info and within hours of the sharing the sales more than quadrupled. I’m pretty sure that I have reached a lot of potential fans of my series through Facebook. But even so, I do waste time there, for sure.

I’ve resisted trying any other social media because I feel that I give enough time to Facebook and blogging as it is.

Lev Raphael: I signed up for Twitter and Facebook because I thought they’d be interesting ways to get my work out there beyond what I’d previously done.  Frankly, they’ve been more important in terms of fans finding me (which isn’t quite the same thing), and for learning about news, books, authors, or places I might not discover otherwise.  The downside is what everyone knows: Facebook can be a black hole. I try to limit my time there to, say, fifteen minutes in the morning.  I’m not always successful.  However, the days I stay away from it I tend not to miss it.

What I dislike most about Facebook is that people often misread things there and take offense quickly without thinking through their reactions.  Twitter and Facebook are both very cold ways of interacting that can create hot reactions.  They lack crucial basics of human communication: tone of voice, facial expression, body language, and the ability to repeat or backtrack or correct.  I also think people in a lousy mood can go ballistic on both those social web sites, take out their bad moods or work out their problems on others.   The quick nature of both media can bring out the bitchiness in some people, and too frequently does.  I’ve seen people de-friended on Facebook for ridiculous reasons.

I also think that Facebook can elicit inappropriate sharing from people who don’t know when to stop posting.  I’m not talking about authors telling fans and friends about meals or vacations, alerting them to readings or book sales or new books. When an author brags about royalties, that’s crossing a line – but then the problem with Facebook is that the lines are blurry anyway because the whole thing is so removed from reality.

Nancy Means Wright: I’m on Facebook with both a personal page and my Mary Wollstonecraft page, which early on attracted over 900 people – but I can’t see it has sold many books. People on FB don’t want to read a lot of “Buy Me” posts. So I try to entertain with lighter fare. Moreover, FB doesn’t show my photos, et al. the way it used to, so the page isn’t as interesting as it once was.

Goodreads (now acquired by Amazon) is helpful: I offer three or four Giveaways of each new book and usually have just under a thousand people wanting a copy. Sometimes I get a review, as well, and recently a reviewer of The Nightmare won $50 for her delightful review sent to Bas Bleu catalogue. I also post Giveaways in Library Thing, and might or might not get a review there. I’m on Linked In, but doubt it sells books. No Twitter at this point—I simply haven’t time!

I’m on listservs (chatrooms) for Crimethrutime,  Dorothy L, Historical Excerpts group, MMA, MWA, LLDreamspell, Red Room. And other subgroups within larger groups. I’m on Linked In, too, and seem to attract friends, if not sales.  I’m on two group blogs: PP of course, and Vermont Book Shelf, which is just for Vermont fiction writers. In a sense, blogs count as social media, since we do give and get comments. I make a point, too, of commenting on blogs by people who comment on mine. A courtesy – but I usually find them interesting, and learn something new.

Is social media a time suck? To a degree, yes – it keeps my name alive. But everyone is out there trying to promote his/her book, offering free e-book copies, et al. – and I’m just one of hundreds or thousands.

As a former teacher, though, I like to help others in any way I can. It’s in the blood.

Sara Hoskinson Frommer: Unless you count DorothyL, I don’t even dip my toes in.  Time pressure, for sure.  And I’m leery of Facebook. Blogging doesn’t worry me in the same way.  Not sure why.  Except that there too I protect my time.

Sheila Simonson: The main problem with social media is the way they suck up time.  I use Facebook and Linked In, though not as well as I’d like to.  It would be helpful if each medium would set up a user-friendly tutorial exploring all the possibilities, and if that’s not likely, perhaps some kindly expert somewhere could summarize.

Camille Minichino: When one of my stepdaughters was in college in San Diego, she’d send us postcards. “I’m in the library studying,” she’d write.

“No, you’re not,” her father and I would respond (to each other), “You’re in the library writing postcards to all your family and friends.”

That was about 20 years ago. That same “girl” is now on Facebook, posting up to the minute reports on what she’s doing. “Hubby and I are enjoying a date night,” she posts.

“No, you’re not,” her father and I say. “You’re on Facebook.”

In other words, Facebook hasn’t changed who we are; it’s simply our current tool. I try to use it the way I use any tool—to serve my needs, under my control. Not that it always works that way, but it’s my choice, and I can never blame it for time wasted. 

Albert Bell: I must admit that I view social media with suspicion. That’s due partly to my age (late 60s) and partly to my temperament (deeply introverted). I don’t want people following me, on Twitter or in any other fashion. Nor do I want to follow anyone else. I have better things to do with my time than to tell people where I’m having coffee or to be told where someone else is having coffee or anything else about their lives. Some days I think J. D. Salinger had the right idea – hole up and write. I’m not a Luddite; I use a computer and the internet for hours every day, in my job and in my writing. I have a couple of web sites and am on Facebook, but the current craze for interaction through social media feels to me like a violation of privacy – mine and everyone else’s. Blogs do seem to offer the kind of safe distance between the person posting and those commenting that makes me more comfortable. And a post on a blog is usually thought out more fully before it goes public.

Nancy Tesler: As a traditionally published author from the pre-internet, pre-ebook days, I am a total dunce when it comes to using social media. I am learning, however, that it’s an important tool for me as an author, to have in my arsenal in order to get my “brand” out there.  Consequently, I do have a website and a Facebook page.  I also, thank God, have a wonderful friend/assistant who helps me.  I have not yet ventured into Twitter or P<interest, partially because I’m intimidated, and partially because I find even Facebook a tremendous time suck. When I see how often some people post, I wonder how they get any work done. It takes too much time out of my day just to read all the posts, much less to post frequently myself.

Having said that, I believe the announcements I posted on Facebook for a recent eBook giveaway were very helpful. I posted at least two announcements with graphics before the three-day-giveaway and one on each subsequent day. The various posts were seen by 150 to 1400 people and I received many more “likes” than I’d had previously.  FB had given me $50.00 to do an ad and I did take advantage of that. Reportedly I had a good click-through rate. How many of those people actually downloaded the book I can’t say. The tremendous success of the promotion and the sales of my five books that have followed, I attribute to my having purchased a featured spot on Bookbub and to a lesser extent on Awesome Gang. Both sites have FB pages and numerous subscribers.

Kicking and screaming I’m being dragged into this new world. I don’t believe any of us can afford to ignore it.

Sue Trowbridge: Before the advent of the Internet, fans would only hear from authors when they had a new book out. I used to get occasional newsletters from writers like Carolyn Hart, Charlotte MacLeod and Elizabeth Peters via the U.S. mail. Today, thanks to social media, it’s possible to keep up with many of our favorites year ‘round. I can see Cara Black’s photos from Paris, find out which New York Times opinion pieces Lev Raphael has been reading, or get a movie recommendation from Lee Goldberg. In addition, I follow publishing industry watchers like Sarah Weinman on Twitter to find out what’s new in the book world. One thing the folks I follow have in common is that they all seem to genuinely enjoy interacting with their fans and friends, and they frequently have useful or fun information to share, not just “BSP.” If social media is not for you, don’t worry about it. Many of my favorite authors, like Peter Robinson and Marcia Muller, don’t have a social media presence at all. It doesn’t make me any less likely to buy their books. I think all fans recognize that the most important thing an author can write is not a status update – it’s an excellent book!

Wendy Hornsby: I have resisted the social media.  Like Rip van Winkle, I had a long nap in my publishing career.  Not as long a nap as his, but during which as much change in what was familiar occurred as his did. In 2009, when In the Guise of Mercy was published by Perseverance Press, I had been away for a decade, except for short stories. I was encouraged to start a webpage and to go on Facebook and to join various Listserv groups. I did what I had time and resources for.  But it seems that every week there is something more, and each new medium requires both more time and more tending. Honestly, because I am still teaching full time, and writing, I find the social media to be a great time suck. How productive is it?  I don’t know.

Recently, I participated in a writing project led by my friend Tim Hallinan. After the success of an anthology of donated short stories to raise money for Japanese relief after the great tsunami, Tim asked the participants to next contribute to a book about how various authors, twenty of us, create stories. Do we plot meticulously, or do we fly by the seat of our pants? The product of our conversation is a very fun book called Making Story.

The project was interesting from the beginning, and continues to be. When Making Story was first released as an E-book original, and then a paper and ink POD, we all posted on Facebook, blogged and tweeted like mad. I wrote about the book in my bi-weekly newspaper column, hawked it whenever I spoke about writing. With the efforts of twenty authors, the initial sales soared. And when the efforts faded, so did sales. We bottomed out at #300,000.

To bolster sales again, during the period from April 12 to 16, in honor of Income Tax Day, we offered the book online through Amazon, for free. Once again, we all hit the social media by storm.  By Friday morning, April 12, Making Story was number one on Amazon in the category of books about writing.  By Sunday morning, it was in the top 100 of non-fiction e-books.

It will be interesting to see if all the work to promote the book when it was free will help sells when it is back at its regular $3.99 bargain bite.

Do the social media sell books? Sure, given enough time, effort, and variety of postings. Would I alone be able to create such a move in the rankings as twenty of us working together affected? Nope. I know that there are bloggers, tweeters, reviewers and Likers (is that a new noun?) for hire at the rate of about five bucks per post. But I’m a school teacher so I doubt I’ll ever go that route.

For now, I have a web page, I check Facebook every week or so, I post on the getitwrite.wordpress.com blog for Perseverance Press authors and post on various guest blogs.  I write my newspaper column, “No Mystery Here,” for the Grunion Gazette.  And at the moment, that’s about all I can manage. Tweeting? If you explain why I should, maybe, after I retire.

Janet Dawson: Yep, it is a time suck. Which is why I don’t post on Facebook that often. I blog here with my fellow PP authors and I have my own blog, Got It Write. I view blogging as an opportunity to write short pieces about whatever catches my fancy. But sometimes it’s several weeks between posts. I was on Twitter for about a year but I still don’t get it, so I got off that one. I did get on Pinterest and am having fun with it, simply because it’s a place to post all the cute kitty pictures of my fabulous felines and my beautiful roses. Does it sell books? Maybe. But I work full time, which means writing time is at a premium. I simply don’t have the time or the inclination to devote several hours a day to social media, at least not right now. In fact, I just put up a sign on my desk that reads “Write First!”

Well, right now I can’t. But hey, it’s way better than a couple of months ago when I couldn’t wash my own face.

That was after surgery on my left hand to get back some pain-free functioning in three fingers that couldn’t hold a book or knit a mitten without cramping. But you have to give some up to get some back. For more than a month, I showered with a plastic bag over the cast, and I paid helpers to bathe and dress me. I’d had plenty of time to plan ahead–I borrowed bigger shirts and sweaters from my sister to make it easier to pull clothes on over the plaster and then the fiberglass cast, and I baked bread, cooked soup and meat, and froze good things to eat.

Little by little, I got bits of my life back. After several weeks of therapy, I’m not done yet, but I can do many of the things I could before.

Like type. Last spring I blogged here about “Persevering with the Dragon,” and by this year I knew that voice-recognition software well enough to dictate all my writing for a couple of months. I even did mailing labels for the postcards I sent out to announce my new mystery, and other kinds of labels for the postcards I’m using as handouts for the library book signing and sending to mystery conferences.

And I sent a longish email to people I thought might possibly give a hoot about Her Brother’s Keeper or the ebooks that are now all up on my website. Dragon NaturallySpeaking wrote that email and the many I sent every week for a volunteer job, but while still wrestling my cut-and-pasted tendons back into usefulness, I’m actually typing this blog.

I’m bragging, both ways.

I’ve kneaded my first batch of bread but still can’t tie my shoes. Or pull up the fiercely tight compression hose I’ve needed for years. I’m told now that pulling up my knee socks may be what damaged the tendons in the first place. But after training a bunch of women helpers to do that time-gobbling job, I’ve taught my husband how, and taught myself just barely enough patience to see us both through the frustrating process. Pulling up socks and tying shoes aren’t enough to justify hiring expensive help. Not easy, but I can do this if he can. Not gonna be a wimp.

* * * * *

Fast forward a few weeks. Another batch of sourdough oatmeal bread is rising in my old wooden bowl–good wrist therapy, that. My hand is getting stronger, and I now finally have a new plastic sock aid (the kind I’d tried before was useless) that works well enough to help me get the darned things on in a couple of tries. Not if you follow the written directions, mind you, but with some common sense, it’s possible. And I’m stubborn enough. The good news is that it should help prevent future damage to the just-healing tendons and my other ones, too. And my husband’s.

I hope that hand soon will be better than before the surgery. That was the whole idea. Bluntly, it’s a whole lot harder to exercise the patience than the hand. I knew that ahead of time–that’s why I hired the helpers. It’s easier not to grouch at a stranger than someone close to you. And if I slipped up, the hired helper wouldn’t have to put up with me for long. The plastic puller-upper I’m using from now on can’t even hear what I mutter if the socks go on crooked and I have to start over to keep them from pinching my feet.

Going through this kind of thing reminds you that only lucky people get to hang onto their independence their whole lives. Most of us will have to give up bigger or smaller chunks of it at some point. Not easy to do. Hard even to think about.

So I’m working on it. Toughing out pain is one thing. Losing abilities can be harder, except for the unrelenting kind of pain we all hope to be spared. Losing all choice is hardest of all. You can plan ahead and control your life only so far. After that, you have to hope the people who start making your choices will leave you enough of them that you won’t mind needing to have your face and other spots washed, and things done their way that you’d rather do your way. And that they’ll guess right what matters to you if they have to guess. Even advance-care directives can’t spell out everything.

I can practice not taking choices away from other people myself. The bossy know-it-all in me is doing better about back-seat driving, and not just in the car. Not easy. But I’m not gonna be a wimp.

And for now, at least, I can tie my own two shoes again.