Tour's End

One week ago today I was on my way home from the Love Is Murder Conference up in Wheeling, Illinois. I took the train home out of Chicago's Union Station--the ride was pleasant, but boarding was a surreal experience. What is it about train boarding announcements that cause people to immediately become angry and aggressive? One would have thought we were queuing up for the last loaf of bread in Stalingrad, 1942!

The Wheeling Westin is one of those prairie hotels--not much nearby to walk to. The bellman said I could get a cab for the 10 minute ride to the local Panera if I didn't want to have breakfast at the hotel. And from my hotel window I watched a herd of deer wander into an apartment complex! Wait--there was this place that was certainly worth the breezy stroll across the parking lot. (I bought something there, but, hey, I'm not telling!)

There were stranger sites, though. The hotel was also hosting a reenactor convention. Apologies for the terrible pictures...At one point on Saturday night I was caught in the middle of twenty women in hoop skirts who were so determined to get past me and into the ballroom, that I was afraid I'd be swept away!







Congrats to my friend--and recent Handbasket guest--CJ Lyons, who won a Love Is Murder LOVEY Award. Her 2008 book Lifelines won the Readers' Choice award for Best First Novel! Pictured with her is fellow Ballantine author and one of my favorite dinner companions, Steve Berry. Steve won a LOVEY for Best Thriller--The Charlemagne Pursuit. (He always looks so serious in photographs, but he was definitely smiling when he accepted it!) Also below is a pic of me with Steve and his darling wife Liz, the terrifyingly efficient Executive Director of Thrillerfest.





Other Highlights:

Seeing that the book room sold out of all but one copy of Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts. Being on the Editor and Reviewer panel with Jon Jordan of Crimespree. Finally meeting the ever-charming Rosemary Harris (she'll be on the Handbasket as soon as I can send her interview questions), and seeing Julie Kramer, whose STALKING SUSAN was just nominated for the MWA Edgar's Mary Higgins Clark Award. (Both pictured below) Having some good chat time with Shane Gericke, seeing Jason Pinter, and meeting James Strauss who writes for an uber-popular television show and is launching his new book series with Five Star this spring. Meeting the prolific and charming Erica Spindler, and, oh, and I can't forget J.T. Ellison, of course. It was truly the last sigh of the Blonde and Blonder tour!



Julie Kramer, Rosemary Harris


Me, James Strauss

Seems that the Love Is Murder board has decided not to hold a conference next year. It's a shame. The relatively small size of the conference means that there's lots of good writer/reader contact and a manageable number of panels. I'll be interested to see if they decide to grow or keep the intimate nature of the thing. Still--Chicago in February?!

In the Handbasket: CJ Lyons

I can't believe it's already time to have my friend CJ back in the Handbasket. Her debut novel, Lifelines, came out last March, and her second novel, Warning Signs, was published on Tuesday. I'm thrilled to have her back at the blog, and totally psyched about seeing her at next week's Love Is Murder Conference in Chicago!

Welcome, CJ!

Tell us about Warning Signs and how it connects to your debut novel, Lifelines.

WARNING SIGNS is second in the Angels of Mercy series. It's a coming of age story about a young medical student facing her own mortality as she investigates the mysterious deaths of patients and then begins to suffer the same deadly symptoms herself.

LIFELINES, my first book, was definitely more of a thriller. It was the classic stranger comes to town story (I love old westerns) and the pacing is rapid-fire, the stakes raised until the entire city is at risk.

WARNING SIGNS, however, is more of a mystery, focusing on the whodunnit and howdunnit of a mysterious illness. It's still fast paced, but more about the medical student coming to her own as a healer.

The third book, URGENT CARE (due out in November, 2009), is back to the world of thrillerdom--it's darker and edgier than either of the first books. More emotionally complex and the plot is also more complicated.


What did you learn about yourself as you wrote Lifelines and Warning Signs?

That it's okay to take risks and expose yourself to the reader. Each of the main characters in the series struggles with a lot of the same issues I've struggled with either as a woman or as a physician.

For my own life, I've also learned that out of disaster comes opportunity. Something so simple, yet we often get so caught up in distractions that we forget this in our daily lives.


Every time you and I have a conversation, you make the most wonderful, relevant literary references. Who in your life instilled you with such a love of reading and learning, and how did you develop it?

Growing up we didn't have many toys--we tended to mainly run around outside like wild things, using our imagination to make up games/dramas. But living in central Pennsylvania means a lot of days when you're cooped up inside.

My mother was a great reader, so there were books all around--first, they became my playthings, then as I interpreted the little squiggles inside, they became my companions. I skipped "Dick and Jane" and went right to Agatha Christie and the like: Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tolkien, etc.

My nephew takes after me--by the age of nine he's read "heavy" books like At Dawn We Slept about Pearl Harbor--a book I myself didn't tackle until college. It's been such fun introducing him to the books I loved as a kid--it's hard because almost any other books engaging enough for his reading level have explicit sex, so I went back to the classics. He's plowing through Nero Wolfe and just finished the Lord of the Rings.


On your website, you describe yourself as "medical suspense author," but your work reaches beyond the usual suspense novels and delves deeply into the relationships between your characters. How do you keep that balance in a genre that demands almost constant plot action?

Thank you for noticing! Most of my reader mail comments on the depth of my characters and realism of the trouble I cause for them.

I guess that's the key to my pacing--staying true to my characters but also constantly creating havoc for them that forces them to push themselves to the edge and beyond.

Yes, I do love to torture my characters! And indeed, my characters drive the plot, not the other way around. I think no matter how action-packed a story is, the most compelling ones are those that have an emotional core based on characters and their relationships.

I feel so strongly about this, that I actually coined the term: Thrillers with Heart to describe these kind of fast-paced, high-stake novels that revolve around the personal stakes and relationships moreso than the action.


Your travel and teaching schedule is jam-packed. Not all writers are so motivated to teach other writers. What motivates you to teach and how do you balance teaching with your busy writing schedule?

As a pediatrician, I love teaching--it was part of my daily life when I was still practicing. It's been such a joy to find that I can still teach as part of my new career as a writer.

But, honestly, I learn something every time I teach, so it's a win/win for me! As for balancing, I have begun to limit my online classes to offering them only once a year and trying to arrange for my live appearances to coincide with my book releases. It's tricky, but well worth it since teaching is so rewarding.


What do you see yourself doing in five years? Ten years?

Tough question! I definitely want to still be writing, but I'd like to think that I'd be exploring new areas of character--both real and fictional. I like to dream that by then perhaps my books will have attracted the eye of some oh-so-brilliant TV or film producer and I would love to somehow be involved in adapting them to screen.

Basically, I guess the same as I've lived my entire life: exploring new ideas and sharing them with others through my work, either by writing or by teaching.


A question from Bengal, my nine year-old: What was your favorite thing to do as a kid?

Watch the Pittsburgh Steelers win Super Bowls!!! Second to that, reading a good book, collecting salamanders and racing them (hotwheel tracks are good for this), making forts in the woods near our house, and generally finding new ways to get in and out of trouble....

You can find out more about CJ at her website. She has some pretty amazing stories on there, plus links for writers.

Evil

Lucky for us, fiction comes in many flavors. Some fans of crime and suspense fiction don’t mind the full-gore treatment—But I, and several other writers I know, can attest to the fact that other readers are vocal about wanting the violence in their crime fiction to be restrained and tidy, more like Agatha Christie than Cormac McCarthy (a tree hung with dead babies, anyone?). Or, in film/tv parlance, more Masterpiece Theater than Quentin Tarantino.

There is a scene in Isabella Moon in which a character is nearly decapitated by a psychopath with an axe. An earlier version had the psychopath completely decapitating him and rolling the head into a room like a bowling ball. My editor thought it was a little over-the-top. Okay, yes, it was way over the top—melodramatic, even. (I have melodrama in my soul, and I am not ashamed!)

Sadly, fiction can barely approach the hell that reality can be. Even I, a sort of connoisseur of the truly horrible, was taken aback by the news story about the two French students stabbed to death last week in London. From the London Times: "Bound up by their attacker or attackers, they received multiple stab wounds in the head, neck, back and torso. Mr Bonomo was stabbed 196 times, Mr Duthie said. Almost 100 of those wounds were inflicted to his back after his death. Mr Ferez was stabbed 47 times."

I was particularly struck by this particular police understatement from another version of the story: "We are here today because I don't know why these boys were killed or who killed them," Duthie said. "I do believe, however, that those responsible must have been bloodstained when they left."

There is evil in the world.

A friend of this blog, CJ Lyons, recently did a terrific guest piece at Murder She Writes where she discusses real-life evil and fiction. (The follow-up comments are riveting.) Obviously, the subject moves and motivates writers—we can’t help but explore it because it is all around us. Are writers and readers doing the same thing? Exploring and trying to make sense of an often mad and maddening world? My guess is, yes.

Catching Up With CJ Lyons

CJ Lyons is one very busy thriller-writer chick. Her cross-genre novel (thriller, medical suspense, steamy romance) LIFELINES debuted back in early March, and she's been in constant motion ever since. Once upon a time she was a pediatric ER doc. Now, she spends her time writing, traveling, teaching other folks how to write and being one of the nicest people on the planet. When I first met her in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt in NYC at Thrillerfest (2007) she was literally dashing through the lobby on the way to her next speaking engagement!


Serendipity, Kismet, and All that Jazz…by CJ Lyons

Thanks, Laura for inviting me to come join the fun here on Handbasket! I just got home after visiting 13 cities in 8 weeks to launch my debut novel, LIFELINES, so if I seem a little random and wandering, it's not your imagination, lol!

My little tour seemed to have a life and a theme of it's own: "fortuitous" was the word I found myself using most often.

The fact that I'd been asked to speak at several major meetings this spring and teach workshops at others and that all this paid-for-by-others travel coincided with the release of LIFELINES was the first piece of fortune. (And no, publishers rarely pay for book tours for anyone these days, much less a debut author—it all comes out of our pocket unless you've been lucky enough to be an invited speaker)

Then, Berkley moved LIFELINES' release up a month to March and I was able to launch at Left Coast Crime in Denver with so many of my friends—and how convenient that Left Coast Crime wasn't on any coast this year, but in the middle of the mountains!

Add to that an unexpected invitation to the VA Festival of the Book (a most totally awesome week-long celebration of books and reading in Charlottesville, VA) and I was starting to get goose-bumps…what would happen next?

Nothing much, except little things like a schedule mix-up leading to my first ever signing being with the wonderful and delightful (I'll let you decide which is which) Rhys Bowen and Steve Hockensmith; being in the right place at the wrong time and thus giving several TV and other media interviews; helping the marvelous and most generous Heather Graham and her band of Slushpile Players perform for the kids at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, my own alma mater….not to mention the huge coincidence that RT Book Convention was in Pittsburgh this year where LIFELINES is set!!!

The list goes on and on and on….like my aunt needing surgery in Pittsburgh (she's not from Pittsburgh) the same week as RT, so I could commute from the conference to the ICU at Presby to see her (she's doing fine, thanks so much to all the kind thoughts everyone at RT sent!); or the fact that while I was rushing from hospital to hotel and back again, every time I needed transportation either a bus or taxi (unheard of in Pittsburgh) would miraculously appear…..

Wait, it gets better! My second book (revisions done while on the road promoting the first, yikes!) is also set in Pittsburgh and had a scene involving the River Rescue guys. So, on the final day of RT, I hop off a bus from the hospital, and am walking back to the hotel when who do I meet but Hank Phillippi Ryan (more on Hank in a sec) and she wants to go for a walk.

We head over the Clemente Bridge to the river walk only to find the River Rescue guys out with their boat—Hank brazenly talks our way on board and voila! These guys spent an hour with us, answering all my questions, taking me on the boat, and just being the nicest, most fun research ever!!!


Then Hank and I meet up again the next week at Malice Domestic. And how is she rewarded for her random act of kindness? She wins a freaking Agatha!!!! How's that for Karma? Yeah!!

Well, that only scratches the surface of the Wonderful Mystery Tour for LIFELINES, but I think you can see that official book tour or not, there's just nothing like throwing yourself out into the universe and seeing who or what catches you….trust me, it's all good!

Thanks for reading!
CJ

Things to do at Left Coast Crime in Denver, Day 1, Minus 1

Writers are supposed to know many interesting things. But this writer had no idea that Denver, Colorado (where I'm attending the Left Coast Crime Convention) is actually NOT in the middle of mountains. On the way from the airport to the downtown Adam's Mark Hotel, the shuttle driver informed me that Denver is at the very edge of the flatlands, at the feet of mountains. I felt very ignorant in that moment. It seems that it's all flat--and massively uphill--from the banks of the Mississippi to here. Did you know this? Go figure. I'm tempted to blame one of my geography teachers for my ignorance, but I expect it's my own fault for not paying attention.


While the actual conference is in Denver and begins tomorrow, I spent the evening in Boulder. Boulder oozes charm and hipness and tiny million dollar homes. My friend CJ Lyons, whose debut novel, LIFELINES, is out today (YAY, CJ!), did a group signing at High Crimes Mystery Bookstore on Pearl Street. (Sadly, High Crimes is closing its doors next week to reopen as web-only.) There I also met writers Peter May, Rhys Bowen, Louise Ure, and Steve Hockensmith. A thousand thank-yous to my friend/Thrillerbabe Margie Lawson for giving me the grand tour. There's a picture of the radiant CJ somewhere here....

I saw a darling Keeshound tied up and waiting for its owner outside of a restaurant. Foolishly, I did not take its picture. BUT I did see the Disaster Animal Rescue Hummer. That was a little surreal. Must be a Boulder thing.


My room at the Adam's Mark is as big as Texas. Everything is oversized here in Denver, too. I can't wait for the conference to begin tomorrow. My first panel is in the afternoon, the topic is psychological thrillers, and I will proudly proclaim that ISABELLA MOON is chock-full of psychopaths out for thrills!