Writers are Readers? Oh yes!

Writers are readers? Yes, of course we are. That’s why I immediately answered novelist Katherine Stone’s e-mailed invitation to check out her web site, Writers are readers.com. (www.writersarereaders.com). I’m only too glad I did.

Katherine said that she and her husband, author Jack Chase, who created the site, noticed something odd about the book review process. Authors of commercial fiction were rarely involved in reviewing books, when one would think such authors would know a thing or two about the craft of writing. Stone and Chase are also aware of the decline in book reviewers in the print world as print itself shrinks while the internet expands exponentially.

As a result, these two creative types have produced what I find to be a fascinating website: authors reviewing books by other authors. The game is, the authors can handle the review any way they choose. Yes the famous names are there, and as I scanned down the list I found several whose works I know and respect: there’s Linda Fairstein whom I met at last year’s Sleuthfest and whose mystery, Entombed, is filled with little known lore about Edgar Allen Poe. John Saul whom I met at the Maui Writer’s Conference a few years ago, fulminates about his training as a playwright, before he gets down to writing a perceptive review of The Diana Chronicles, and I thought everything had already been said about Tina Brown’s book. Heather Graham has posted a review as well. I met and interviewed Heather years ago as a reporter. Why am I not surprised that this actress-turned-novelist hit the big time?

Those of us who are newbie authors are also offered the opportunity to submit reviews, after our peers vouch for us, that is. As it happened I was reading A Grave Injustice, a paranormal mystery by author Prudy Taylor Board at the time and was pleased to do a review of this exciting read. In the process, I found myself using some examples from Prudy’s book to talk about how very specific imagery is what a seasoned author uses to put real flesh on the bones of her characters, as Prudy does so aptly.

Katherine Stone loved the review and asked me to submit more of them, which I intend to do as time permits. For quality book reviews, by authors themselves, the people who know a thing or two about writing, browse through Writer’s are Readers.com. I do hope you readers who love a good mystery will check out my review of Prudy Board’s book. Author Board uses the paranormal genre as a springboard to some fascinating World War II history. My feeling is, you’ll do yourselves A Grave Injustice if you miss out on this gem of a mystery.

Boxing Day

Negril, Jamaica:

Boxing Day, Dec 26

The morning sun polishes a smooth sea to a metallic sheen, a gorgeous but blinding sight, which is why the early diners take shelter under the thatched roof of the LTU Pub, the runway between the kitchen and the bar. The family straggles in.

Jamaica Bill, who does his best to keep the rest of us from running amok, arrives with a brick of the smoked marlin left from last night’s Christmas dinner and we polish this off with bagels, cream cheese and a fruit plate of pineapple, papaya, and, wonder of wonder, bananas. A hand of bananas arrived this morning by bearer, and so young Luke promptly orders LTU’s famous banana pancakes. We’ve been here a week now, and it has been Yes We Have No Bananas until this morning. Hurricane Dean earlier in the fall has been hard on the crop.

The smoked marlin has a delicate flavor all its own, by the way, and is as good an excuse as any to sojourn in Negril. Another excuse is coconut water, sucked right out of a green cocoanut via means of a straw. Coconut water is the only juice that goes straight to the heart. As any Jamaican will tell you, a glass—or a nut-full of coconut water, mon, it’s good for the blood pressure and the heart.

The Williams clan is in a triumphant mood. Yes we managed to pull off a tropical Christmas dinner at Jamaica Bill’s place, despite the fact that his beach house perched on the sea cliffs took a few hits from Dean. At least the roof stayed on the place this time, and most of the crockery remained intact. The light fixtures in the kitchen, however, were defunct, due to salt water intrusion, leaving us to cook by lamp and candle light.

There’s a tense moment early in the afternoon when the gas stove that was supposed to be roasting the oven coughed and quit. Jamaica Bill ordered everything off, all top burners. A sniff test ensued, some dials were twiddled and yes the chicken was roasted to a perfect skin crunching crisp.

Louisiana gumbo was supposed to be the main course, but had to be scratched due to the absence of a viable quantity of okra. We found a bud or two along the fence on the property at LTU Villas, but that wouldn’t do for twenty guests. Mama Nanin stepped in with a new plan. Shrimp in marinara sauce, so we chopped onion, garlic, and green pepper, but not the celery, a delicacy which Jamaica Bill had ordered for the now-defunct gumbo project, but Mama Nanin sniffed and informed us that in the wider culinary world—beyond the States—celery is a nonentity. The Parisians wouldn’t touch the stuff.

Mama Nanin brought all the makings for her famous champagne punch and then some, which is how she managed to pour a bottle of vodka into the mix, rather than triple sec, intended to substitute for peach schnapps. Oh well, the brew proved to be as powerful as it was popular.

Jamaica Bill made his famous pesto pasta, the one with the artichoke hearts. Jamaica Bill’s pesto is fresh made and he supplies it in bulk to the rest of the West End, at least the tonier establishments.

At one point a strange round object lined with what appeared to be lightening bolts appeared on the TV screen. This proved to be the interior of young Luke’s eyeball. He was trying out one of his Christmas presents, an electronic microscope, an Eyeclops, which you hook into the TV screen. The inside of an eyeball is an eerie sight indeed, especially if you’d had more than a few sips of the champagne and vodka punch.

A day which began with snorkeling, the exploration of sea caves, the sighting of jelly fish, dolphins, a thing that was probably a sea snake, and the discovery of baby coral growing in a tide pool meant an early end to the festivities.

The party ended when young Luke asked Jamaica Bill to produce the bottle containing a famous relic, the two-foot centipede. After fifteen years in a jar, the centipede has shrunk to a shadow of its vicious self. Jamaica Bill, who is six feet four inches tall, told how he managed to battle to the death this aggressive creature by standing on a kitchen stool and spraying it with an entire can of bug spray, the fumes of which nearly poisoned Jamaica Bill himself before the centipede expired.

At that point, those of us who were about to expire from the ravages of the champagne punch were driven back to our rooms at The LTU Villas, while the heartier souls retired to the pub bar to toast in Christmas.

The Twenty Somethings arrived late, wolfed their breakfast, and sped off. It’s going to be a tough day for them, what with a catamaran cruise on the Wild Thing in the morning followed by a reggae party tonight on Seven Miles beach and so they left their back-to-the States gift shopping to be done by cooler heads. Three bags of Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee and two rum creams ought to do it, Mom. Or is it two bags of the coffee and three of the rum cream? Oh dear, leave it to Mom to get it wrong.

Young Luke is off to scuba class followed by a trip to the beach, leaving his grandparents Bill Senior and Mama Nanin free to reminisce about the good old days in Havana, New Orleans, Houston, Paris, Vermont, Bloomington, and places like that.

Our friend Janice from Boston has arrived with a late bulletin: the water system has been switched over to backup so don’t drink the tap stuff, but I’m already tapped out and so far am feeling very fine, except my left leg is a bit stiff from yesterdays climb up and down the steep steps cut into the side of the West End cliffs. The stairs wind through a lava tube and end at a shelf carved into the cliffs, where we dive into the sea for a cool down before slathering on the sun oil and settle into some serious sunbathing. Nevertheless, when Janice proposes a trip to Mayfield Falls where we’ll explore a mountain spring, I’m all for it.

The Winter of the Wood Stork

Fort Myers, Florida

As usual I was running late for a mundane appointment, when I glanced out on the lake. There on the point just around the bend, a vision appeared, the likes of which I never expected to see: wood storks. A pair of them had just touched down in our sedate suburban neighborhood, a cluster of low-rise villas with Hawaiian-style notched roofs the better to repel high winds, since we happen to inhabit a flood plain embarrassingly close to the Caloosahatchee River.
Yes, we’re squeezed between a mini-lake and a river, and yes, we are a small scale bird sanctuary, what with the cattle egrets cackling like a flock of exotic chickens as they march around the lake, grubbing for goodies out of the lawn. Anhingas arrive and depart daily from designated pine tree limbs with the regularity of an airport shuttle; coots, mallards and moorhens glide past the door, and red-headed woodpeckers drum on the tree trunks. Our back yard is occasionally patrolled by a very patrician great blue heron, but wood storks? An endangered species? What were they doing here?

I grabbed for one of the several pairs of binoculars we keep out for just such chance occasions as this, and consulted the Birds of Florida Field Guide. Through field glasses I watched these birds fluff their white plumage like a pair of tall feather dusters. When flashes of black appeared on their under carriage I knew they were wood storks.

About forty inches tall with the long, curved bill of a wading species, and the bald, leathery black head of a turkey, the wood storks teetering along on stilt-like legs were an ungainly pair, a comedy in feathers, so to speak.

Appointment forgotten, I crept toward the birds, hoping the sun might disappear behind a cloud. The bigger stork stretched out one enormous wing, revealing a wide black racing stripe along the trailing edge. I was enthralled. This was a gull-wing sort of move, if you’ve ever seen one of those fancy cars where the doors open from the top—only now, thanks to this sighting, I’ll think of such a movement as stork-winged.

At any rate, the demonstration of wing-power that I witnessed made me acutely aware that these storks’ wingspread seemed twice as wide as the birds were tall. This no doubt accounts for the fact that these frequent fliers don’t bother with baggage checks and airport security.
Lax photographer that I am, I had no camera in the house, so I tried for a shot off my cell phone, but I was facing into the sun and the cell phone informed me in a curt message beamed from some satellite that it could see nothing to photograph. If I managed to creep through the neighborhood and photograph the wood storks from the other side, I’d miss the action completely. Instead, I sought a witness, our friend Domingo, who had just arrived to clean out the gutters, so that he could enjoy such a rare sighting.

I also called Flora, who lives across the street in a sprawling garden compound full of native and exotic species. I asked Flora if she had ever seen a wood stork in the neighborhood. Never, she said. Not once in the twenty-five years she’d been on her beloved property. Flora couldn’t come over; she was headed out on some appointment of her own.

“They’ll be back,” she assured me, but I haven’t seen the wood storks again, and this sighting happened a week ago.

Meanwhile, I began to fear that if wood storks were showing up in my neighborhood, this was probably an ominous sign. It meant that the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary where the storks nest must not be in good shape, and in checking up on the internet, I found my fears confirmed. The nesting season in ’07 was a disaster due to a hundred-year drought here in Florida.
During the `80s, birders and government officials discovered that the U.S. wood stork population had dwindled to some five thousand pairs. The main haven for wood storks and other species is the Corkscrew Sanctuary, the nation’s last remaining stand of native bald cypress trees, a fifty by seventy-five mile swath of old timber purchased from lumber companies by the National Audubon Society in 1954. The Corkscrew Sanctuary is open to the public, located just north of Immokalee Road in the rugged and beautiful Central Florida interior. This is primeval country, a world of flatlands, prairie marshes, and bald cypress forest about fifteen miles west of I-75 at Immokalee Road between Fort Myers and Naples (http://www.corkscrew.audubon.org).

Wood storks wade in swampy areas catching prey by feel. Since the ‘60s their habitat has been shrinking due to pressure from farming and urban development, and well before that, of course various bird species were hunted to extinction in the late eighteen hundreds.

As for the wood stork, efforts to preserve habitat and monitor the birds has paid off. The wood stork population has doubled, according to a five-year assessment recently concluded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency has recommended that the status of the species be upgraded from endangered to threatened.

Snowbirds such as us have nothing on wood storks, which may range from the Carolinas to Latin America. Troll around on the internet, and you’ll find studies of individual wood storks that were banded and tracked via global positioning devices. These fascinating accounts show that in a group of ten or so wood storks, one individual might have started out from a home base in South Carolina and hardly moved from its home county; another might have trekked from the Carolinas down to Key West, maybe headed down in time for the Fantasy Fest, while an even hardier or adventurous bird headed for the Yucatan peninsula and was perhaps learning to tango in Cancun.

Due to rapid development, the Florida habitat is the wood stork’s least stable nesting ground. In January, thanks to a $200,000 grant from the National Park Service, the resource manager from the Corkscrew Sanctuary is monitoring the wood stork in five southern Florida counties, looking for more places where the birds might have secured nesting grounds. Meanwhile the biologists tracking the wood storks have learned that these resourceful birds have helped themselves. Colonies of them have moved on to Mississippi and North Carolina in search of better nesting.

Meanwhile, I do hope our own neighborhood passed muster with the wood stork pair. If only they would build one of their platform nests hereabouts, wouldn’t that be a thrill? After all, a wood stork wouldn’t have to pass muster with some condo board. But I wonder? If a pair of wood storks move in, would they have to be approved by the anhinga brood? And what about the snooty great heron? Would he let them in?

To Sleep Perchance to Dream

It’s bad enough I can’t get a good night’s sleep. Now my computer can’t, either. The first message I got from the Windows wizard this morning is that my laptop can’t access its sleep network. I suppose I’ve infected my electronic pal with my insomniac habits. I fear the machine will start dozing or locking me out while it takes a nap every time I try to get some work done, or, even worse, eat my address book in a binge of what sleep doctors call “sleep eating”.

I can only hope that my insomniac laptop will do with sleeplessness what I do, turn out a novel. If my computer wrote a novel in the middle of the night, perhaps I could analyze its subconscious and figure out how to put it to sleep.

My sleep habits have gotten so bad that when I woke up in the wee hours a couple of nights ago, I tried reading an article called The Secrets of Sleep in the hope of catching some zzzzz’s. It was the lead piece in a Discover Magazine devoted to various Medical Mysteries of the first (and worst) order.

Trouble was, an ominous green eye in a pallid face on the Discover’s cover was enough to keep an insomniac awake for the rest of his or her natural life. The green eye was positively reptilian, set in a sea of ghostly skin, lacking both brows and lashes. I’ve been told that my eyes have turned green already. What’s next? Will my lashes fall out and my brows disappear if I don’t get some sleep?

Frankly, the eye was so scary I’d never have bought the magazine; one of my sons brought it into the house. Unfortunately for my boys, their sleep patterns take after mine. It may be that we are the hyper types described in The Secrets of Sleep as genetically disposed to sleep problems; our only consolation is, other poor souls have it worse.

I read about a tormented woman who has tried everything: hypnosis, yoga, soothing tapes, pills. Now she has anxiety attacks because she cannot sleep. Even worse, there are people who sleep for eight hours in sleep labs and wake up to report they’ve never been asleep at all. Sad to say, I took heart from these sad stories. So what I can’t sleep? I’ve learned to cope. I’ve made insomnia work for me.

The more you obsess over a lack of sleep the less of it you’ll get. At least that’s what happens to me. So I cope by denial. I’ll go to bed early and sleep for four or five hours then be wide awake. If I’m lucky, one of my characters will be talking to me. There’s nothing like writing to tire out the brain. What I love best of all is a writing stint from two a.m. to six followed by a good solid nap from six to eight a.m.

If you can’t go for the full eight hours, then five or six hours and a nap after a burst of work is the next best thing—at least this works for me. One of the greatest geniuses of all time, the inventor Thomas Edison, was such a great nap taker that he kept a cot beside his desk in his lab. These days, or so I’ve heard, the sleep gurus are encouraging corporations to allow their employees to nap on the job.

The trouble is, my long-suffering husband hates my restlessness. He used to threaten to divorce me if I kept waking him up in the middle of the night but when he couldn’t shake me after thirty years he finally caved in and built me a writing studio two steps from my side of the bed.

Maybe he caved in because he has sleep problems of his own. I just identified him as “a sleep talker” in the Discover article. These sleepers natter on and on in their sleep and nary a word leads to a sensible conversation.

The other night I woke up to find one of my sons eating a Dagwood type meal in the middle of the night, a whopping sandwich chased by a couple of beers. He thought the booze might put him to sleep; it will, but not for long enough.

The best I could offer him was my latest method of bargaining for sleep. I don’t use the “s” word when I’m lying in bed trying to get some shuteye. I tell myself that what I’m really aiming for is an entertaining night of dreams, the kind I’ll remember in the morning.

Bed: The Most Dangerous Sport in America

Falling out of bed. Haven’t we all done this, either figuratively or imaginatively?
I would venture to say that we have. Beginning in toddlerhood. Ending in second childhood. There’s nothing unusual to be said about that.

Which is why I paid scant attention when some TV pundit reported upon some newly released statistics from some government agency or public commission or nonprofit something or other. FOX? CNN? I can’t really say who brought this up. Bicycles were the most dangerous contraptions in America. Beds were a close second.

No way, I protested silently as I went about whatever the business of the moment happened to be. Was I indulging the hazardous preparation of lunch? Risking my life the better to fold the socks? About to wrench my back while dusting sconces? Whatever it was I was doing at the moment I heard the latest inane pronouncement, I was aghast and indignant.

Motorcycle riding was the most dangerous sport on earth. Bicycles had to be number two, if they ranked at all. Not that my perceptions were biased by the fact that a certain young man who had been forewarned about the evils of motorcycling had taken a flying leap off a cliff on a Kawasaki over the summer and broken every rib that God gave him, plus a few he invented as he yowled in a hospital bed. I wasn’t biased against bicycle riders, sconces, or anything equally dangerous, so why pick on beds? Those havens of sanctity? Those blissful shelters we take to when things aren’t going well? Those sources to time travel and heroic adventure? How on earth can beds be the second most hazardous means of travel we possess?

I gave no further thought to this issue until a day or two later when I got a call from Barbara Oehlbeck. Now, if you happen to be among the two or three people in the State of Florida who don’t know who Barbara Oehlbeck is, I’d be happy to introduce her.

Barbara is the author of books about Florida plants, including The Sabal Palm. She’s a well-known columnist and Florida historian, whose most recent book, The Ranch, recently won top non-fiction honors from the Florida Publishers Association.

Of course, my perspective is somewhat different, since Barbara Oehlbeck is the godmother of my novel, The Serena Scandal. At any rate, we were talking about the forthcoming release of my first novel The Don Juan Con in a new edition, which Barbara had endorsed. I called her to update her attribution, when she began to tell me her tale of falling out of bed. This made Barbara one of the toughest people on the planet and a national statistic.

Just a day or two prior to my call, Barbara admitted, she had tossed and turned one night while attempting to gain a more advantageous purchase on her pillow. She had suddenly slipped and fallen from her perch on a very high bed. “You do know how high they make mattresses these days, don’t you?” Barbara said.

Barbara banged her head on her antique iron bedstead and then, as if that were not indignity enough, she bashed her head against the floor, awakening her husband, Dr. Lou. He's a pathologist, who, if things had gone badly, could have at least supplied an explanation as to what might have befallen his dearest beloved.

By this time Barbara was laughing, describing the lumps on her head and I was commiserating--with the floor. After all, Barbara being Barbara, we were talking about serious gashes in the floor such a hard-headed woman would have left there.

So, as statistic go, I have to admit that the government (or whomever) is correct, and yes, beds are indeed not only dangerous from the standpoint of our physical safety and well-being. Then I began to realize that beds are also dangerous in psychic terms, which is where the novelist enters in.

Bed, as we all surely realize, is fraught with danger. Bed, particularly the propensity to get into it with the wrong person, is a danger I feel certain was not included in the statistics. Perfectly sensible people do this all the time. For instance, I recall the story of the woman who woke up one morning and found herself in bed with a man she barely knew; and whom she had not only slept with but had gotten married to at some point in some hazy weekend. This happened in Las Vegas, I believe.

What impressed me most about this lady’s tale was not that she was somebody I’d made up; she was a respectable person and a licensed family therapist, who very sensibly got a quickie divorce and got on with her life. And let us hope she went into counseling herself.

Beds, I now realize are profoundly dangerous, not only from the “What on earth am I doing in here with him/her?” but also, “How come I just woke up and found my hands tied to the bedposts?”

In such situations it is the duty of the novelist to supply the hero or the heroine with the psychic underpinnings or the moxie which allows this person in distress to barter, buy, manipulate or otherwise find his/or her way out of trouble.

Now, I wonder what agency is compiling this second sort of statistics about beds? If we figure in all the psychic dangers of getting a good night’s sleep, then, indeed, it must be true that the bed is by all odds the very most dangerous place in America on any given night. And so, it is with that thought, my dear readers, I wish you all the best in pursuit of that most dangerous occupation: a good night’s sleep.

A Bad Hair Day

It is indeed a shock when your own hairdresser has a bad hair day, especially a a series of them. I was sitting in a salon hot seat recently, having my roots rescued, catching up on the life saga of the hairdresser I’ve had in Fort Myers for at least twenty years. She’s a formidable woman who has survived various health problems and family traumas with pluck and aplomb. Due to the fact that I had been in the San Juan Islands over the summer, I hadn’t seen my friend in awhile, and I was astounded by the fact that her business was thrown for a loop when a woman who worked at her salon had walked out and started a rival salon right across the street. This, of course, created great upheaval among her clients.

Wait a minute, I found myself thinking. This is a real-life version of a plot right out of the Bad Hair Day Mysteries by Nancy J. Cohen. In Died Blonde, the book I happen to be reading at the time, hairdresser Marla Shore is helping her detective boyfriend find out who murdered a rival salon owner who was out to ruin Marla’s business by moving into the same shopping center and pulling all sorts of nasty pranks on Marla. When the rival turns up dead, suspicion turns Marla’s way, but she’s sheltered by her lover, Detective Vail, who, fortunately for Marla, has a full head of hair which she styles on a regular basis.

I’ve met Nancy Cohen several times and always enjoy her books. I ran into her again at the Murder on the Beach Bookstore booth at the Miami Book Fair, where we were signing books. Nancy signed a copy of Died Blonde for me.

Meanwhile, Nancy gave me a ringing endorsement of The Don Juan Con which will go one the cover of a forthcoming edition. Nancy got the whole point of what I meant to do with Don Juan. I aim to raise awareness of a certain type of romantic swindle that amounts to the emotional rape of the victims. Nancy was kind enough to interview me for her blog, and I’ve posted a copy of interview in the review section of this site. Here I am, a fledgling novelist being interviewed by a famous one!

Check out Nancy’s blog for yourself:
(http://www.mysterygal.bravejournal.com)

Meanwhile, Nancy’s latest book, Perish by Pedicure, was reviewed by Jay MacDonald in the Fort Myers News-Press, Tropicalia Magazine, Dec. 17. MacDonald gave Nancy a great review and I enjoy Jay’s work because he also interviews the authors he writes about and delves into their background.

MacDonald did the best he could for Nancy, but Jay’s a guy, after all. I met Jay MacDonald last year at The Lee Reading Festival in Fort Myers. Jay’s a tall, handsome fellow and quite the speaker. He even has a reasonable amount of hair. MacDonald just has to be a barbershop type of male who never set foot in a hair salon, however. Why am I saying this? It’s because the root appeal of the Bad Hair Day Mysteries is to the millions of women like me who swap life stories with their hairdressers for years on end. What guy could figure that out, unless he’s a salon-styled male like detective Dalton Vail? For women, the hairdresser and client lead very separate lives, and so their relationship, however enduring, has a secretive, parallel universe quality to it.

The lives of the hairdressers I know are full of the same sort of mayhem that turn up in The Bad Hair Day Mysteries, and so of course, we can project a bit of our hairdressers’ lives onto the Marla Shore character. This, I believe, is what makes Nancy J. Cohen’s mysteries so cozy in the best sense of this traditional genre.

Out of Touch

An old-fashioned snowstorm blew in the Monday after Thanksgiving , creating a fairytale setting, here in the San Juan Islands, a robin's egg sky, brilliant sun orchestrating a dazzling scene everywhere it touched. Every tree limb, bush and railing is covered thickly in a layer of powdery frosting. The house is filled with the smell of woodsmoke and lamp oil and the ticking of the grandfather clock. The power has been out for close to thirty hours now. There's nothing left of the twenty-first century: no internet, no telepone; the cell phone is on its dying gasp and the car is frozen solid. I've tramped up and down the neighborhood where the only news comes by word of mouth. Power has been restored in the hamlet of Eastsound. This is a major bulletin. Do I care? Not really. Tonight I'll have oil lamps to read by and propane to cook with and feather comforters for warmth, and in between there's a spectatular white world, the likes of which has not been seen here for a decade.