Starry Starry Night--A fantastic picture of the Milky Way

I'm a city girl and in the city, the sky hardly ever gets dark enough to see the whole blanket of stars out there. But a few years ago my best friend and I went to New Mexico and there I saw the Milky Way for the first time. it was awe-inspiring in the old, mythic meaning of awe. When you see the Milky Way, especially for the first time, you understand why ancient people made it a part of their myths. I saw this photograph on cnn.com this morning. It's like something out of a fairy tale.  You can see a whole gallery of such images here.

May Flowers...Black-Eyed Susan by Thomas Pluck

Thomas Pluck is a great writer.  If you haven't read his story "Black-Eyed Susan," you're in luck. It's one of the stories featured in his collection, Steel Heart: 10 Tales of Crime and Suspense, which you can buy right now on Amazon for 98 cents. You have 99 cents in your sofa cushions right now, so don't wait another minute. Go get the book. "Black-Eyed Susan" isn't the first story in the collection (it's "Gumbo Weather") but turn right to "Black-Eyed Susan" for a story that will hit you like a punch to the solar-plexus, knocking the breath right out of you. Thomas Pluck is a great writer.

May Flowers...Lauren Willig's The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

In Lauren Willig’s The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, a lovelorn American historian stumbles across a series of letters that unmask a historical mystery and tell another love story.

ELOISE KELLY is a Harvard-trained historian spending a year in England researching her dissertation.  It has a bland title that got it past the committee (something to do with aristocratic espionage during the 19^th century) but what she really wants to do is unmask the identity of a spy known as THE PINK CARNATION. Unlike the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian (two other aristocrats who saved others during the French Revolution), the Pink Carnation’s identity has never been revealed. 

Desperate for information, Eloise has resorted to sending out letters to the descendants of the Pimpernel and the Gentian, in hopes that the families might have some information for her.  She sent out almost two dozen letters but received only three replies.  One was a form letter with the times the Scarlet Pimpernel’s home is open to the public.  One was a letter from Mr. COLIN SELWICK clearly discouraging her interest in his family.  And one was a letter from MRS. ARABELLA SELWICK-ADDERLY inviting her to tea.

The dual time-frame story that unfolds from there manages to avoid most of the pitfalls of most such stories (an unbalanced narrative where the past story is more engaging than the contemporary one as it was in both THE FRIENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN and POSSESSION) but the story that takes place in the past really is a romp.

That section of the novel reads like a regency romance, with a dash of old fashioned books like THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL and THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO thrown in.  (One of the conventions of this book is that the Scarlet Pimpernel was a real person and that his masquerade inspired imitators like the Purple Gentian and the Pink Carnation.)  There’s also a strong dash of Jane Austen here, and the writer seems to be having a great time.

The double sets of lovers—Colin and Eloise in the present; Richard and Amy in the past—are types we’ve seen many times but Willig makes the obstacles to their relationships engaging and entertaining. We like Eloise and are curious to know how her story turns out. Amy (the Elizabeth Bennet character) is headstrong and spoiled but she’s also smart and brave and resourceful.  She and Richard are a perfect match and we know that the moment we see them together. (We also suspect that Richard’s formidable mother will approve of Amy.)

There’s talk of this book being turned into a graphic novel, and that could be a lot of fun too.

May Flowers...a GoodReads poll

There are many reasons I enjoy GoodReads andI love looking at their lists and polls. This month they have a poll asking readers what book with a flower in the title they're looking forward to reading in May. Read it here.

May Flowers--Phillip Kerr's March Violets

March Violets is the first book in Kerr's "Berlin Noir" trilogy featuring the detective Bernie Gunther.  the story takes place during the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the backdrop of the mystery is seething with anti-Semitism and the consolidation of Hitler's power. ("March violets" was a term used to describe late-comers to the Nazi Party.) If you're a fan of historical mysteries, you owe it to yourself to check out Kerr's books.

Cannes 2014

Water is life...

As much as I love words, I also love pictures and sometimes...a picture really is worth a thousand words. This PSA is one of the most powerful I've ever seen. Really gets to the point. If you want to know more about the Tar Sands Blockade, click here.

May Flowers... Apothecary Rose by Candace Robb

Apothecary Rose is a book that combines a couple of my favorite things. It's a mystery; it's written by a woman; and it's set in medieval times. Owen Archer is the hero/detective of the 14th century tale, a Welshman who lost an eye in the "wars in France" and now makes his living as "an honest spy" in the employ of the Archishop of York.  Apothecary Rose is the first in the series, which now number in the double digits. While Owen is the protagonist of the books, his "supporting cast" includes a couple of strong female characters--his apothecary wife Lucie, and Bess Merchet, a local tavern keeper.

Candace Robb has a PhD in medieval literature, and the books are full of all sorts of vivid details that make the time period come to life. She also writes a series of novels about Margaret Kerr, which are set in 13th century Scotland. Margaret's first "case" involves her own missing husband (A Trust Betrayed),  I find it kind of amazing that A Trust Betrayed has only 17 reviews on Amazon while other books (Gone Girl comes to mind) have thoursands. (Gone Girl, in case you're wondering, has more than 18,000 reviews.  I liked it too but really?  Eighteen thousand and Candace only gets 17?  The balance seems a bit off.) 

Candace's books are cozies, and sometimes, after a long day of dealing with clients, that's just what I'm in the mood for. If you are too, and you've already read all of the Brother Cadfael books twice, check out Candace's books.

May Flowers...Torch Ginger

In my misspent youth, I lived in Honolulu for a year, working as an assistant editor at Aloha Magazine, a gorgeous, slick quarterly magazine that mostly catered to the tourist trade. I lived in a high-rise apartment that overlooked the Iolani Palace (familiar as the office of the original Hawaii 5-O) and Punchbowl Veteran's cemetery. Of the many things I appreciated about Hawaii after living in Los Angeles was that the air was always warm and scented with flowers not car exhaust. When I think of Hawaii, I almost always think of flowers.

Torch ginger

Hawaii is made of flowers--many of which are too delicate to transport to the mainland. I grew particularly fond of pikake, which is often used in lei-making.  Pikake" is the Hawaiian word for jasmine. One of the showiest flowers I saw in Honolulu was torch ginger. It was used a lot in hotel flower arrangements and my office was originally in a hotel.  (At the time, Don Ho was the biggest act in the islands and he appeared at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. I often shared an elevator with Mr. Ho, who was always cordial.)  The other cool thing about the hotel (a rumor management tried to stamp out) was that the goddess Pele was said to make appearances every once in a while. Pele's an intriguing and powerful goddess. When she appears to mortals, it's (usually) in one of two forms--either as a beautiful woman or as an ancient crone. She's usually wearing a red dress and fire is usually invovled.  I cannot tell you how much I wanted to run into Pele.  But I digress.

Torch Ginger is also the name of one of Toby Neal's "Lei Crime" series mysteries, and a book I snagged when it was being promoted as a freebie for Kindle. If you're like me, you've probably wondered if giving a book away free does anything for you except distribute your books into the wild, I can tell you that Torch Ginger made me a fan and I've since gone on to read (and buy) other books in the series. there are now six in the series (Shattered Palms, the latest, came out in March.) For those bemoaning the lack of women writing crime fiction that's about women, the novels are a treat. They "star" Det. Leilani "Lei" Texeira who not only island hops (this book takes place on the island of Kauai), but transitions from the police to the FBI. Neal's writing is very accessible and Lei is a likable character. You definitely need to check out the series, which begins with Blood Orchids.

May Flowers....Tanith Lee's Blood of Roses

My first introduction to the writing of Tanith Lee was a double-novella compilation (Sometimes After Sunset) I got from the Science Fiction book club. (I loved mail orderbook clubs, especially those that would let you get 12 free books for joining.) The two novellas were Sabella, or the blood stone, a vampire tale, and the other was Kill the Dead.

I loved Tanith Lee's writing from the very start, her lush prose and gorgeous imagery just spoke to me and I embarked on a binge of Lee-reading, hoovering through the local library's collection of DAW paperbacks and then haunting used bookstores for copies of other books. Lee's a prolific writer but I still managed to catch up to her pretty quickly, and I've tracked her work ever since. I'm pretty sure I've read almost everything she's written in the last 20 years. Everything, that is, except for Blood of Roses.

Blood of Roses is another vampire novel and it is almost as hard to find as Jane Gaskell's legendary vampire novel Shiny Narrow Grin. Amazon sells used copies beginning at $30 and new copies for $88 and although I love me some Tanith, that's just a bit out of my price range right now. (Used to be I wouldn't think twice about dropping twice that much in a bookstore but these days I'm full-time freelance and $30 is a tank of gas, or a couple of printer cartridges or some other "mission-critical" item and I just can't justify spending that these days. So it's on the wish list for the days when my KDP royalties become more significant than they are now. Has anyone read it?  I'd love to know what you think.

May flowers...Every rose Has Its Thorn

I was surprised the first time I read an unexpurgated version of Sleeping Beauty and discovered how cruel and bloody a story it really was. (Which made me think how interesting it would be if George R. R. Martin wrote a series of fairy tales reimagined in his Game of Thrones world. Wicked Queen Cersei as any number of horrible stepmothers!  It would geektastic. But I digress.)

I've been thinking about the fairy tale because I'm working on a paranormal version of Sleeping Beauty in which the prick that sends the Princess to sleep is actually the sharp kiss of a vampire bite. I'm not sure how it's all going to work out, but it's a lot of fun working on it. And the rose imagery will be everywhere.

And meanwhile, here's my favorite version of the Poison song "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," the duet from American Idol with Brett Michaels and Casey James.

May Flowers--Flower confidential

I am fascinated by behind-the-scenes stories of various industries, whether it's the "Red Market" trade in organs and bones, and blood or something like the famous expose of the funeral business, like Jessica Mitford's American Way of Death.  turns out the flower business isn't so sweet-smelling either. I ran across Flower Confidential while looking for something else, and it's a book that's now on my wish list.

And if you've ever wondered why those perfect roses you buy for $5 a stem have the fragrance of a fridge-chilled plastic bowl, you'll find out here. This is a book to pique the flower fascination in us all.

May Flowers...Blood and Roses

"April showers bring May flowers" and I thought it might be interesting to blog about flowers this month and how flowers relate to dark fiction in general. Naturally, the first flower that comes to mind when I think of dark fantasy and flowers is the rose. I always liked "Blood and Roses" by the Smithereens (wonder what happened to them) and have a story in a collection of tales of the same name. (the collection is not available on Amazon.com, but the there are a slew of titles that use "blood" and "rose" in them.

There's also a "Blood and Roses" forum community that's connected to a series of paranormal books.  (roses are almost as integral to vampire lore as garlic and crucifixes, which is interesting because in religious iconography, the rose is Mary's flower. It's also associated with Muslim lore and poetry and is also the city symbol of  Islamabad, Pakistan.

I remember reading Margaret Truman's cozy mysteries set in DC an dfor some reason thought that she'd done a "Murder in the Rose Garden" title, but she didn't. (Here's a list of all her books.)  There's an Ellis Peters "Brother Cadfael" mystery called The Rose Rent. there's also a novel called The Blue Rose, that's part of an English Garden Mystery series.  there's just something very mysterious about blue roses, probably because they don't exist in real life. (There are breeders who are getting close but they're not there yet.)  But blood roses just seem dark and strange. Check out this blood rose image by Trivalia.

Z is for Zombie

From: World War Z

If you asked me what my favorite monster is, my answer probably would not be Zombies. And yet, I really enjoyed Zombieland and Warm Bodies, which are at the opposite ends of the zombie movie spectrum and could not be more different from each other if they tried. I've also tried my hand at writing a few zombie stories and Christopher Grant (of A Twist of Noir) indulged my taste in Z fiction by publishing a few of them on his zombie fiction blog, Eaten Alive.  One of the best stories from Eaten Alive was written by the late AJ Hayes. It's called "the End of Our Zombie Days." I was able to tell AJ (I didn't know him well enough to call him "Bill") how much I liked the story when I met him at Noir at the Bar. If you've never read it, it's heart-breaking and it's here.

Y is for Yoshimoto, Banana

I was glad to find out that "Banana" Yoshimoto is a pen name and not one of those unfortunate appellations bestowed at birth by parents who should really, really know better. The writer is pushing 50 now, but she still does teenage angst better than almost anyone, except perhaps S. E. Hinton. Her first novel, Kitchen, was published in 1988 (to wild acclaim and commercial success) and since then, she's been busy, with 12 novels and more than a few collections of essays. Her novel The Lake was published in English in 2010, but it was originally published in 2005. I wonder what she's up to now?

X is for book titles that begin with X

I belong to Goodreads and one of the things I really like about the site and its community is the endless array of lists that the readers have put together. Just out of curiosity, I went over there to see what they had to say about X and I found this list of books with titles beginning in X.turns out the list was created specifically for bloggers doing the A to Z challenge, which I appreciate.  Ihad to go down to number 15 before I hit a book I'd read, Lynn Hamilton's The Xibalba Murders. the first in her series of mysteries about  Lara McClintoch, an archaeologist.  There were 11 books in the series, with the last one coming out in 2007, the year before her death.

As it turns out, the only other book I've read on the list (which includes titles from writers as disparate as Edith Wharton and Andre Norton) is #27, Walter Greatshell's Xombies. 

Why Ask Why?

My first foray into "indie publishing" was in October of 2010 when I put out a collection of short stories called Just Another Day in Paradise.  I was a total newbie at the time, but guided by the incredibly patient and helpful G. Wells Taylor (author of my favorite vampire novel Bent Steeple), It got it together and put it up for sale. I made some mistakes--the TOC isn't interactive, which it should be, and I paid, way, way, way too much for the awesome cover image. (I'd do it again, though. I saw the photo when it was first published in the newspaper and then tracked it down with the most intensive Google image search ever.)

The collection was never a big seller, so at some point, I made it "perma-free."  And as it turns out, there are a lot of people who wn't pay 99 cents for a collection of short stories, but are more than happy to pick it up for free. (Yes, I CAN give my work away.) So month after month, I've watched people "buy" the book.  Some of them have been nice enough to leave reviews (thank you very much) and in the intervening four years, the collection has rarely been out of the top 10 of free book collections. So I have to ask--why has there suddenly been an uptick in downloads of the book this month, nearly four years after it first became available?  So far this month, I have "sold" more than 300 copies of the collection and it is now rated #3 in athologies and collections/horor and #6 in anthologies and short stories in the fantasy/sci fi genre.

I'm not complainng, I'm just curious.  If you haven't read the stories and would like to, you can find the collection free here. 

W is for Woody Harrelson

Woody Harrelson kind of sneaked up on me. One minute he was in an endless loop of Cheers reruns, and the next thing I knew he was playing everything from a bad-ass zombie killer to a political strategist to a corrupt Louisiana cop. (I loved, loved, loved True Detective and it was mostly because even when the story got out of hand, watching Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey was an absolute pleasure. I liked them together in EdTV too.) Before True Detective, my favorite Harrelson role was in Game Change with Julianne Moore and Ed Harris.

I really admire actors who move beyond their comfort zone when they're choosing parts and try out new things and change things up. And Harrelson's done everything from Hunger Games to No Country for Old Men to Now You See Me.  His next project is a movie called Triple Nine, which I read when it was being shopped around to distributors. It's a thriller with a great cast (Casey Affleck and Kate Winslet and Chiwetel Ejiofor are just some of his co-stars). I can't wait to see it. And I can't wait to see what he does next.

V is for Veteran

Illustration by Mark Satchwill

Just when I'm getting crankypants about CNN pandering to the lowest common denominator, they blindside me with a story that just about broke my heart. You may have seen it--a brief report about a homeless Air Force veteran wo died in his van and has been unclaimed ever since. A former waitress is trying to raise the money to bury him somewhere other than in a pauper's grave. (It's unclear why the military isn't stepping in to provide Michael John Pardalis a resting place in a Veteran's cemetery, but the woman who is trying to raise money to bury her former customer does mention she needs to get a copy of a particular form. I remember that form. When my father died, we found it in a trunk full of apers pretty much by accident and if we hadn't had it, my father would not now be buried in Arlington Cemetery.)

At any rate, it's a moving story, which you can see here. And with the story there's once again a light on one of America's most shameful secrets--the way veterans are treated when they return from serving their country. My father werved in the war before the war before the one we're in now and the one before that as well. He came home from North Africa and went to law school and then re-enlisted in the Army's Judge Advocate Corps, building a career as an Army lawyer. He was already married when he saw overseas service in the Korean War and by the time the Viet Nam war was heating up, he had three children. He was offered a promotion if he accepted a transfer to Saigon but at that point, he and the Army parted ways and he (and we) settled down while he worked as a consultant for private citizens with claims against the government. Turns out (and I know you'll be shocked by this) that the government often makes promises to people that they don't keep. A lot of those broken promises are made to the men and women who serve in the military.

At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, there's an inscription that reads, "Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God." There are a lot of soldiers out there and God knows all their names and so do a lot of people. And every one of those soldiers deserves to rest in honored glory and not in an unmarked grave where they'll be forgotten.

The illustration here is by Mark Satchwill, who created it as part of our NoHo Noir storyline inspired by the murders that were then taking place in Southern California. The victims were all homeless people, several of them veterans. The illustration has haunted me for years. I think it's the most powerful thing Mark has done.

U is for Ulin, David

David Ulin is a writer, a book critic and an editor. He edited one of my favorite books about Los Angeles, Writing Los Angeles, which brings together writers as disparate as Chester Himes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Christopher Isherwood. (And of course, Raymond Chandler.) The book has an elegant cover too, clean and graphically simple and yet evocative. 

David Ulin's book The Lost Art of Reading ("Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time") is based on this essay he wrote for the L.A. Times. Ulin used to be the Times' book editor and then became a critic in order to focus on his own fiction.)  I've never read any of Ulin's fiction, but I have several of the books he's edited on my shelves. This is a man who celebrates the act of reading. This is aman whose name writers should know.

T is for Troubled...

I am troubled.
I came of age during the last gasp of printed news so I saw the rise of both local "happy news" and the birth of CNN.  From the very first, i was a fan of CNN because they seemed to value substance over style, and their anchors seemed chosen more for their skills than their appearance. I still got most of my news from newspapers, though, until about the middle of the first decade of this millennium when I cancelled my L.A. Times subscription in a cost-cutting measure because the WGA strike had cut my income considerably.

I get most of my news online now and mostly I turn to CNN.com. That means that along with reading the news, I have a choice of video content. And lately, some of the choices they've made for that content have been troubling to me. Today (it's Tuesday 4/22) there are two multi-media stories on offer that go beyond what I think of as the scope of a news story and into the realm of ,,,pandering to prurient interst. One is a video of a poison gas attack.  I'm not sure what the purpose of the story is--to act as evidence against the perpetrator of the crime? To show what happens when poison gas is used? To get more people clicking through?

The second story troubled me more though. It was a story about the people who called for help when the Korean ferry started to sink. "Audio reveals panic as ship sank."  How many people will click in hopes of hearing some of that audio? And what purpose will that serve? Here in L.A. it's long been news policy to release as many juicy details about celebrity deaths as possible, including 911 calls. Even if you're not looking for that kind of news, it's almost unavoidable. But inviting strangers to listen to calls made in what might be the last moments of a person's life....It's not news. And I'm not going to click.

T is for Tomlinson

I think a lot about my last name. Not so much because I'm egotistical, or just because my name is basically "my brand." But I was aware from an early age that the Tomlinson branch of our family tree was goning to die out if my brother Rob did not have, as they used to say, "issue."

My father was one of three brothers. My uncle Hubert died when I was three years old, not long after he earned his medical degree. He was my father's baby brother, and my father would have been only 33 at the time. His and Hubert's mother had died when they were children and his father died the year before Hubert did, leaving my father an orphan in his early 30s. My father's half-brother, Jim, worked the family farm and died a bachelor. His middle name was Lee, which is also my brother's middle name, a name they both inherited from our grandfather.  My father's younger half-sister is only eight years older than I am and she has a son, but of course, his name isn't Tomlinson.

Tomlinson isn't that uncommon a name. There's an English actor named David Tomlinson who was in Mary Poppins.  There's football player LaDanian Tomlinson who used to play for the San Diego Chargers, whch enlivened the football season for me. (Basketball is my game.)  there's the writer H.M. Tomlinson and when I was a kid, I bought a couple of his novels just because it tickled me to see the name "Tomlinson" on my bookshelves.  I'm not related to any of them. Nor am I related to Ray Tomlinson, who created teh @ separator that makes email possible.

There are 43 different Tomlinsons with a Wikipedia entry, and that doesn't count Tomlinson Holman, an American film theorist and audio engineer who developed the world's first 10.2 sound system. I don't actually know what that is, but I'm always impressed by people who invent the "first" of something and I can only hope Tomlinson did not get beat up because of his unusual first name.  (My father's friends called him "Tommy" which would probably have been a good nickname for Holman.)

S is for Shakespeare, who was born in April

They aren't really sure when William Shakespeare was born. He was baptized on April 26th in 1564, which makes next Saturday his birthday. It is known that he also died in April (April 23, 1616, which made him a man whose life spanned two centuries). That death date, 1616, sounds like a long time ago, but it was actually the 17th century, which somehow does not seem so distant. In his last play, The Tempest, there are references to the place that will become North America ("O Brave New World") and and the preiod known as the Renaissance was already coming to an end. (I was always taught that it ended around 1637.)

Here are some things they already knew in Shakespeare's time:

The earth revolves around the sun (1543)

the earth has a magnetic field (1600)

Galileo was already making detailed astronomical observations although he had not yet formuulated the law of falling bodies.  Johannes Kepler had discovered the first two laws of planetary motion. Shakespeare would have been aware of these studies in the same way that an educated person today is aware of important scientific discoveries. His plays are full of poetic references to stars and one speech from Romeo & Juliet is considered a test of how well an actor can handle the playwright's language.

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”

So Happy Birthday Will!

The illustration is from the Wiki quotes site. Don't know who created it, but it tickles me. Shakespeare would have fit right into the 21st century.

R is for Ellen Raskin

One of my favorite books is Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game. It's a kid's book. Middle-grade, I supposed, but I read it as an adult and was totally charmed. It's a mystery of sorts. An eccentric rich man (Westing) invites a group of people to play a game. The winner will become Westing's heir, but what unfolds is a lovely, character-driven story about love and family and expectations and choices and chances.  Raskin died too young and I take that personally. she wrote several other books, many of them revolving around wordplay like The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel).

Between the Letters--The new sub-genres of romance

Used to be, there were just a couple of kinds of romance novels. There were contemporary romances, like the ones I devoured from Harlequin. And there were the historical romances that always seemed to star pirates, Vikings, or Scottish highland rogues which I didn't like as much. (Still, the best-looking man I ever saw in my life--and bear in mind I live in Los Angeles--was a kilt-wearing Scot in Glasgow.)  Paranormal romance wasn't yet a "thing" and what was then termed "spicy" was not yet what I call "clinical." (I'm not a prude, I'm really not. I've written things I would NEVER have wanted  my mother to read. (Although bless her heart, my retired Methodist minister aunt reads everything I write and is VERY supportive.) But I'm not a huge fan of what's called "New Adult,.  I really don't find all the intense description of the parts all that romantic. For me, romance novels were always more like fairy tals than anything else. You got your prince and you lived happily ever after (HEA).  But now you don't necessarily even get HEA, there's HFN (happily for now).  This is not news to longtime romance novel fans, but I was out of the loop for quite awhile and now that I'm back--I hardly recognize the genre. There are three trends that baffle me--
Alien Tentacle Sex.
Sasquatch Sex.
Forced Birthing Sex.

I'm curious enough about all three sub-genres that I'm going to have to check out at least one book in each category (because unlike some trolls who post on Amazon without actually, you know, reading the books they're reviewing, I like to know what I'm talking about.

I've also discovered that werewolf/shape-shifters and BBW books are a big thing in the paranormal
romance world too. Who knew? I celebrate that trend because it has always annoyed me that so many romance heroines were gorgeous girls (who mostly don't think they're pretty because their shiny brown hair isn't a dramatic raven color).  Real women aren't perfect and real women need the fairy tale too.

I'll keep you posted on the Sasquatch love.

Q is for Question

On August 7, 2011, I posted a story called "Stoway" on the blog. It was a story I'd written to submit to an anthology of stories inspired by Edgar Allan Poe tales. It was my sci fi version of "Masque of the Red Death." So here it is, more than three years later and yesterday andtoday, people have suddenly been visiting that page and reading that story. It's way, way too many people to have just stumbled across the story by accident. Is there a link somewhere I don't know about? If you've found the story, I'd love to know how you got here. 

Thanks and Happy Easter!

Q is for Quick, Amanda

Amanda Quick is one of several pseudonyms used by best-selling author Jayne Ann Krentz, who writes several kinds of fiction under her various names.  I like the idea of using different names to distinguish different genres of books and am always interested in why people choose certain names. Every once in awhile, I'll stumble across a name that really seems made for a pseudonym. Like actor Paul Blackthorne's last name. Blackthorne is a cool last name. "Katherine Blackthorne" sounds like someone who writes Gothic novels, doesn't it? Much more memorable a last name than "Tomlinson."

Before she turned to writing full-time, Krentz was a librarian and it's possible our paths crossed when I was in college because she worked in the Duke University library system. I hope I did. I was in and out of practically every library on campus at one time or another. (the Med School library was a great place to study because it was quiet and also you could meet a lot of cute med students. Not that I was that shallow.)

I love that Krentz genre-hops and also writes mashups. (Some of her books are described as "paranormal futuristic novels of romantic suspense." Sign me up!  I've read a lot of Krentz' stand-alone novels and really enjoyed them. A bunch more are on the TBR bookcase.

Q is for Ellery Queen

My mother subscribed to both Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (EQMM) and Alfred Hitchock's Mystery Magazine and EQMM was the first market I started pitching when I began writing mystery fiction. I badly wanted to be selected for their "first mystery" story but I never made the cut.

Of the two magazines, I preferred EQMM and I eventually went on to read the Ellery Queen mystery series. Ellery Queen started appearing in movies, and eventually in a television series starring Jim Hutton, which I remember enjoying. Full episodes of the series are posted at imdb. In a way, the Ellery Queen series was a precursor of Castle. Queen was a mystery writer. His father (played by David Wayne) was a police inspector and he helped him solve mysteries. I'm surprised no one has rebooted the series yet. Ellery Queen has been around for a long time since being created by two writers who were cousins. It's one of the most successful mystery franchises/brands ever, spannign 42 years.

P is for Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman died in February and the movie with his last starring role, A Most Wanted Man, will be out this summer. The movie was adapted from a novel by John LeCarre, who pretty much wrote the book on Cold War and post-Cold War spy stories, and the trailer llooks pretty exciting.  It's got an incredible cast that includes Ellen Page and Robin Wright, Willem Dafoe, and Rachel McAdams. And watching Hoffman, who gets the last line in the trailer, it's just heart-breakign knowing that this talented man is gone.

And meanwhile, here's the trailer for the book, which features John LeCarre himself.

P is for Mrs. Pollifax

Another of the mystery series I really liked were the "Mrs. Pollifax" books by Dorothy Gilman.  They weren't really mysteries so much as they were "cozy" spy novels. Emily Pollifax was a widow in her 60s who ended up recruited as a CIA agent. the series includes a delightful cast of recurring characters and there's a nice freindship that grows between Mrs. Pollifax and a young agent she works with.

Gilman was named a "Grand Master" by the Mystery Writers of America in 2010, two years before she died.  She also wrote a slew of other mysteries. I've read some but none of them engaged me as much as the Pollifax series. Rosalind Russell starred in a movie version of The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, and Angela Lansbury starred in a TV-movie version. I think the series would make a dandy television series, kind of a Scarecrow and Mrs. King for an older audience.  (Or put it another way, Murder, She Wrote with an international setting.)  The books might be a little old-fashioned and cozy for today's readers but I loved them.

O is for Ophelia

Painting by John William Waterhouse

I am a Shakespeare geek. One of my friends once horrified me by saying he thought Aaron Sorkin was a better writer than Shakespeare and asking me to explain "why everybody thinks Shakespeare is so great." (Don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed his scripts for The Social Network and Charlie Wilson's War. (To be honest though, I was bored to tears by Moneyball. I think Draft Day was the movie Moneyball wanted to be. It's disappointing that not more people are oging to see Draft Day.) But I digress.

The point is that because I love words and never quite outgrew my delight in ornate words (I blame Dr. Seuss with his silly, made-up words), I don't find Shakespeare's language a problem or a barrier to my enjoyment of his plays. I think most high school students learn to loathe the plays because they're forced to read Julius Caesar first.  that play is not the best gateway play into Shakespeare. (I think Macbeth is.  It's got a little bit of everything--a ghost. Murder. A strong female lead.

But wait, you say, Hamlet has a ghost. Hamlet has a murder. Hamlet has a strong female. To which I replay--if you're talking about Gertrude, I disagree. She marries the man who murdered her husband and then leaves her son to take revenge. (Wouldn't it have been kind of interesting if it had been Gertrude whoorchestrated the play that pricked the usurper's conscience?)  And don't even get me started on Ophelia.

I hate Ophelia.  I really do. Manipulated by her father. Mistreated by Hamlet. A suicide at the end. I always wanted her to have more gumption. (A word my grandparents used that has fallen out of favor despite being a great word.) Give me Lady Macbeth any time.