Warning: if you’re afraid of heights, this video will make you squirm. I just watched it, and I’m still whimpering. (It’s six minutes long. And it’s stunning.)
People ask me where I get my ideas. Here’s where: from my fears. I think about what gives me the willies, and I write about it. This lets me face what scares me — safely. I pour it out on the page.
I inflict it on my readers.
Heights aren’t my thing. When I took my kids on the Swiss gondola ride at Disneyland, I wanted to duct tape them to the floor of the car. However, small spaces don’t bother me. So, in my new novel (Watch out! Shameless self promotion ahead!) The Dirty Secrets Club, I created a heroine who’s my opposite. Jo Beckett is claustrophobic. But she loves rock climbing. To her, heights are the place to find the widest open, most unconstrained spaces of all. In writing the book, I took everything I feel when looking down (agh… ohhh, God…) and gave it to Jo when she faces the prospect of getting in an elevator. And I tried to understand how she could thrill to the challenge and rush of getting above it all.
Of course, in a thriller, facing one’s fears should involve a visceral, life-threatening experience.
And no matter how much I try to cope with my hatred of heights by writing about it, no matter how well I eventually desensitize myself to the thought of dropping hundreds of feet into a ravine, I’m not walking El Camino del Rey. No way.
UPDATE: In the comments, Ken asks, “Where is that place?” It’s in southern Spain, and is used as the path to the rock climbing at El Chorro.
I love it when the doorbell rings and it’s not religious proselytizers hawking salvation, or a neighbor holding a box of puppies sired by my dog, or the National Guard warning me that the toxic cloud is ninety seconds away. It’s the FedEx driver, bearing books.
My books. After close to two years of brainstorming, outlining, writing, erasing, rewriting, editing, talking with editors, rewriting again, proofreading, and copyediting, here’s The Dirty Secrets Club, so fresh off the printing press that I can still smell the ink. Call it proof, validation, vanity, reward, or joy — whatever it is, I’m going to go wallow in it.
Kirkus’s Mysteries and Thrillers Special includes a Q&A with me. I talk about secrets and taboos, and there’s a first glimpse of the cover art for The Dirty Secrets Club.
When I was in the Bay Area recently, I did more than wander around San Francisco looking for good enchiladas and spooky places to set my next book. I talked to some real-life pros who will feature in the story: men from the 129th Rescue Wing of the California Air National Guard.
A character in my upcoming novel The Dirty Secrets Club is a pararescueman with the 129th - a search and rescue expert known as a PJ. And now that I’m writing the sequel (and the character is sticking around), it was time to get some first-hand information from the men who do the real job.
I’d figured that arranging a visit to the 129th - and, specifically, to the 131st Rescue Squadron at Moffett Field in Mountain View - would take more than a phone call to the California National Guard’s Public Affairs office. But I didn’t figure that I (and my daughter Kate, who had a local cell phone number) would end up fielding weeks of phone calls from army and air force officials all over the USA. As one colonel good-naturedly put it, they wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to turn up demanding to see the aliens at Area 51. But then the squadron’s chief master sergeant called from Moffett and said, “I hear you want to talk to some PJs. Good news is, that’s fine. Bad news is, we’ll only be here for another hour and a half.” And it was rush hour.
But I got there in time to get the “nickel tour,” as the sergeant called it. This meant waving to the squadron’s SERE trainer, then screeching across the tarmac in a jeep to one of the huge hangars shown in the photo above, where I got to see all the equipment PJs use for rescues on land, at sea, and underwater. I heard about what combat medics do, and then talked to a couple of PJs who generously stayed late to answer questions about their job from a woman they’d never met before.
This weekend on the blog, I talked about how writing is a job. It is. And on days like the one in Mountain View, it’s a great job - talking to guys who skydive, scuba dive, and drive ATVs and Wave Runners at work, and who plan their ascent of El Capitan for their week off. But talking to the PJs also put my work in perspective. These men put themselves on the line to rescue people. They do it in the worst circumstances, without the slightest expectation of riches or glory. They save lives and they’re unassuming about it.
Guys: thanks. And I’m the one who owes you a beer.
When I write a novel, I visit as many settings for the book as I can. My upcoming novel The Dirty Secrets Club is set in San Francisco. So is the sequel, which I’m just now digging into. Here’s a selection of photos from my recent trip to the Bay Area.
Yep, this is research. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.
Land’s End, looking east to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Crissy Field, looking past the gold dome of the Palace of Fine Arts to downtown San Francisco.
The army cemetery at the Presidio.
With my research assistant and proofreader (and daughter) Kate.
A city neighborhood on Russian Hill, above Fisherman’s Wharf.
Sunny day, but the diner’s name is apt.
Special thanks to Snart, who took these photos. And yes, many of these locales will appear in the new book(s).
Have we heard the last of Evan Delaney? I’ve been waiting all year for a new book about her - doubt if I was alone. Must admit I was worried that you might have killed off too many of her friends and family!
You certainly haven’t heard the last of Evan, Teresa. For one thing, the series is going to debut in the US beginning in July 2008. For another, Evan’s story is far from over.
But here’s the thing. While I love Evan, I also have stories to tell about other characters. My next novel, The Dirty Secrets Club, features forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett. It’s set in San Francisco, a great wild canvas of a city that I’ve always been crazy about. It’ll be published in June. I hope folks will like it as much as they like my other novels, and will take to Jo they way they do to Evan.
So my next book has a new heroine - but Evan’s not gone, not by a long shot. And at the risk of repeating myself: no, I can’t tell you what happens to Jesse, Jax, Tater and everybody in the Delaney universe. When you write thrillers, your job involves keeping people in suspense.
But I can tell you this. One of Evan’s nearest and dearest has a cameo in The Dirty Secrets Club. To find out who, you’ll have to read the book.
(Yes, we writers are sneaky creatures. It’s part of the fun.)
I’ve just finished going through the copyedited manuscript for The Dirty Secrets Club. In the publishing process, copyediting takes place after the author delivers the final draft of a book. First the author’s editor goes through the manuscript, writing comments and questions in the margins, perhaps doing some line editing, and marking spots where the author needs to take another whack at the text.
The manuscript then goes to a copyeditor. These pros, often freelancers, wield sharpened red pencils like deadly blow-darts. They go through the manuscript again, doggedly, finding misplaced commas, misspellings, typos and grammatical errors. They also mark up the manuscript for the typesetter, getting it ready for printing. And they relentlessly ferret out continuity errors in the text. Is it Tuesday night on page 12, but Monday afternoon on page 13? Does the heroine wear jeans on page 345, and fishnets half a page later?
The author then receives the manuscript back, and gets the first glimpse of all the corrections and suggestions that need to be addressed. The first time you see a marked-up script, you think your baby’s been attacked. Or that it has the measles. Your pristine, perfect creation has red marks all over it. You then go through it, deciding whether to accept or reject each of the copyeditor’s changes. Generally, because the copyeditor is a pro, and obsessive-compulsive about finding errors, you accept most of them.
With this new book, I received two copyedited manuscripts because (awwright. Yeah! Spike the ball in the end zone and do a little victory dance…) I have both British and American editions being published next year. So I needed to go through several hundred pages, checking the 560,000 characters that constitute the script - twice. I needed to digest suggestions from readers on both sides of the Atlantic and then write all my own changes onto both manuscripts.
This isn’t tough work. (Though thank God the UK and US pages are different sizes. Otherwise it would have been appallingly easy to get them mixed in with each other.) But the timing was tight. The UK manuscript came yesterday. The US manuscript needs to be back in New York on Monday.
And yesterday we celebrated Thanksgiving. I had kids expecting turkey and pies and gravy. Massive quantities of homemade gravy.
But I got it all done. I even think my eyes will uncross again, maybe in a few days.
When Susan Daly won a contest on this blog and earned a spot as a character in my next book, I needed to decide who she’d be. Not, I decided, a psychotic airline passenger barricaded aboard a jetliner. Who, then?
The title of the novel is The Dirty Secrets Club. How about a woman with secrets?
I knew several characters in the story would have powerful secrets. I imagined two of them meeting with heroine Jo Beckett. One was a high-powered businesswoman, sleek and ostentatious; the second was a flighty, nervous TV news reporter with a sleazy past. I wrote several scenes with these people, totalling many, many thousands of words. I kept on writing, hoping that these characters would get proactive, the way other writers claim their characters do, and that they’d “just take over.” Come on, girls, I thought. Run away with the story. I kept nudging and prodding them. At one point I even lifted my hands off the keyboard and told them it to take the wheel. No dice. These ingrates wanted me to do the work.
So I did. Then I let my editors read it all.
They kindly pointed out that I had too many characters. The story didn’t need both Ms. Sleek-Ostentatious and Ms. Flighty-Sleazy. One had to be rubbed out.
Back on the page, my characters heard that and got real interested in self-preservation, real fast. The rich one even tried to bribe me. But to no avail.
Ms. Sleek-Ostentatious had a snooty voice and a deliciously bitchy sensibility, but she didn’t do anything else in the story. She was erased.
That left Ms. Flighty-Sleazy… who needed a good, juicy secret. A good, juicy, plausible secret. And I hadn’t slathered her with the right sleaze factor. (In a thriller, your characters need SPF 40.) It was back to the drawing board. Out went the college sideline as a drug mule. In came…
In came Susan Daly, an ambitious young woman with a past that’s pyrotechnic. The rest is for readers to discover.
I write crime fiction. Both my Evan Delaney series and upcoming Jo Beckett series take place in California, where I’ve spent most of my life. Now I live near London, England, and earn my living inventing stories about the place I came from. Read here about the writing life and the lies that pay my bills.
