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Novel Development From Concept to Query - Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect
Haste is a Writer's Second Worst Enemy, Hubris Being the First
AND BAD ADVICE IS SECONDS BEHIND THEM BOTH... Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect (AAC). This is a literary and novel development website dedicated to educating aspiring authors in all genres. A majority of the separate forum sites are non-commercial (i.e., no relation to courses or events) and they will provide you with the best and most comprehensive guidance available online. You might well ask, for starters, what is the best approach for utilizing this website as efficiently as possible? If you are new to AAC, best to begin with our "Novel Writing on Edge" forum. Peruse the novel development and editorial topics arrayed before you, and once done, proceed to the more exclusive NWOE guide broken into three major sections.
In tandem, you will also benefit by perusing the review and development forums found below. Each one contains valuable content to guide you on a path to publication. Let AAC be your primary and tie-breaker source for realistic novel writing advice.
Your Primary and Tie-Breaking Source
For the record, our novel writing direction in all its forms derives not from the slapdash Internet dartboard (where you'll find a very poor ratio of good advice to bad), but solely from the time-tested works of great genre and literary authors as well as the advice of select professionals with proven track records. Click on "About Author Connect" to learn more about the mission, and on the AAC Development and Pitch Sitemap for a more detailed layout.
Btw, it's also advisable to learn from a "negative" by paying close attention to the forum that focuses on bad novel writing advice. Don't neglect. It's worth a close look, i.e, if you're truly serious about writing a good novel.
There are no great writers, only great rewriters.
Forums
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Novel Writing Courses and "Novel Writing on Edge" Work and Study Forums
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Novel Writing on Edge - Nuance, Bewares, Actual Results
Platitudes, entitled amateurism, popular delusions, and erroneous information are all conspicuously absent from this collection. From concept to query, the goal is to provide you, the aspiring author, with the skills and knowledge it takes to realistically compete in today's market. Just beware because we do have a sense of humor.
I've Just Landed So Where Do I go Now?
Labors, Sins, and Six Acts - NWOE Novel Writing Guide
Crucial Self-editing Techniques - No Hostages- 47
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Art and Life in Novel Writing
Misc pearls of utility plus takeaways on craft learned from books utilized in the AAC novel writing program including "Write Away" by Elizabeth George, "The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner, "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass, and "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard:
The Perfect Query Letter
The Pub Board - Your Worst Enemy?
Eight Best Prep Steps Prior to Agent Query
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Bad Novel Writing Advice - Will it Never End?
The best "bad novel writing advice" articles culled from Novel Writing on Edge. The point isn't to axe grind, rather to warn writers about the many horrid and writer-crippling viruses that float about like asteroids of doom in the novel writing universe. All topics are unlocked and open for comment.
Margaret Atwood Said What?
Don't Outline the Novel?
Critique Criteria for Writer Groups- 24
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The Short and Long of It
Our veteran of ten thousand submissions, Walter Cummins, pens various essays and observations regarding the art of short fiction writing, as well as long fiction. Writer? Author? Editor? Walt has done it all. And worthy of note, he was the second person to ever place a literary journal on the Internet, and that was back in early 1996. We LOVE this guy!
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Quiet Hands, Unicorn Mech, Novel Writing Vid Reviews, and More
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Novel Writing Advice Videos - Who Has it Right?
Archived AAC reviews of informative, entertaining, and ridiculous novel writing videos found on Youtube. The mission here is to validate good advice while exposing terrible advice that withers under scrutiny. Members of the Algonkian Critics Film Board (ACFB) include Kara Bosshardt, Richard Hacker, Joseph Hall, Elise Kipness, Michael Neff, and Audrey Woods.
Stephen King's War on Plot
Writing a Hot Sex Scene
The "Secret" to Writing Award Winning Novels?- 91
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Writing With Quiet Hands
All manner of craft, market, and valuable agent tips from someone who has done it all: Paula Munier. We couldn't be happier she's chosen Algonkian Author Connect as a base from where she can share her experience and wisdom. We're also hoping for more doggie pics!
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Unicorn Mech Suit
Olivia's UMS is a place where SF and fantasy writers of all types can acquire inspiration, read a few fascinating articles, learn something useful, and perhaps even absorb an interview with one of the most popular aliens from the Orion east side.
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Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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Audrey's Archive - Reviews for Aspiring Authors
An archive of book reviews taken to the next level for the benefit of aspiring authors. This includes a unique novel-development analysis of contemporary novels by Algonkian Editor Audrey Woods. If you're in the early or middle stages of novel writing, you'll get a lot from this. We cannot thank her enough for this collection of literary dissection.
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New York Write to Pitch and Algonkian Writer Conferences 2024
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New York Write to Pitch 2023 and 2024
- New York Write to Pitch "First Pages" - 2022, 2023, 2024
- Algonkian and New York Write to Pitch Prep Forum
- New York Write to Pitch Conference Reviews
For New York Write to Pitch or Algonkian attendees or alums posting assignments related to their novel or nonfiction. Assignments include conflict levels, antagonist and protagonist sketches, plot lines, setting, and story premise. Publishers use this forum to obtain information before and after the conference event, therefore, writers should edit as necessary. Included are NY conference reviews, narrative critique sub-forums, and most importantly, the pre-event Novel Development Sitemap.
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Algonkian Writer Conferences - Events, FAQ, Contracts
Algonkian Writer Conferences nurture intimate, carefully managed environments conducive to practicing the skills and learning the knowledge necessary to approach the development and writing of a competitive commercial or literary novel. Learn more below.
Upcoming Events and Programs
Pre-event - Models, Pub Market, Etc.
Algonkian Conferences - Book Contracts
Algonkian Conferences - Ugly Reviews
Algonkian's Eight Prior Steps to Query
Why do Passionate Writers Fail?- 243
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Algonkian Novel Development and Writing Program
This novel development and writing program conducted online here at AAC was brainstormed by the faculty of Algonkian Writer Conferences and later tested by NYC publishing professionals for practical and time-sensitive utilization by genre writers (SF/F, YA, Mystery, Thriller, Historical, etc.) as well as upmarket literary writers. More Information
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Forum Statistics
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Total Topics12.8k
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The Best Psychological Thrillers of May 2024
Each month, I attempt to perform the Herculean endeavor of rounding up all the best psychological thrillers coming out, and each month, I must admit to myself the true impossibility of the task in the face of so many good titles. May, however, has been particularly challenging, in that there are just So. Many. Good. Thrillers. My apologies to all those that I was compelled to leave off the list below, for the simple reason of not being allowed to read, like, all the time. I still have to sleep, okay? And also, of course…do my job. Anyway, enjoy this selection of delicious scandal and disturbing insights! Ruth Ware, One Perfect Couple (Gallery/Scout) Love Island meets And Then There Were None in Ruth Ware’s latest psychological thriller as five couples in an island-based reality TV show find themselves cut off from the mainland during a ferocious storm as a killer picks them off, one by one. Ruth Ware is the new reigning queen of crime, so it makes perfect sense for her to take on a classic Christie set-up. Emma Rosenblum, Very Bad Company (Flatiron) I saw a tweet recently about how one of the most underrated possibilities for thrillers is the corporate retreat gone horribly, hilariously awry. Emma Rosenblum, author of last year’s fabulously scandalous Bad Summer People, has returned with an equally sordid and sardonic take on forced corporate fun, following a group of tech elites as their soused vacation, and house-of-cards company, quickly unravel. Andromeda Romano-Lax, The Deepest Lake (Soho) Andromeda Romano-Lax takes readers to a memoir-writing workshop as pricey as it is remote in her latest novel, a searing meditation on narcissism and motherhood. One attendee has a secret goal: discover the truth behind her daughter’s disappearance, soon after starting work as a general assistant to the workshop’s charismatic conductor. I didn’t have Grand Guignol Mother’s Day on my bingo card for 2024, but here we are. Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent (Flatiron) Fiona McPhillips breathes new urgency into the private school thriller with this tale of justice delayed. In When We Were Silent, Louise Manson enrolls at an elite Dublin academy with a singular goal: expose the swim coach as a sexual predator. Decades later, she must confront her past traumas when another of the school’s coaches goes on trial for abuse. McPhillips infuses her story with deep sensitivity and righteous fury, for a compelling and thought-provoking read. Omar Tyree, Control (Dafina) A frustrated psychologist puts an intricate plan in motion in this insightful new thriller: her talented but neurotic clients and their toxic personalities seem tailor-made to complement each other, and she’s ready to intervene in the name of helping them move forward (and giving herself a break). Unfortunately, the alchemy that results is rather than more deadly than she intended. Omar Tyree is based in Atlanta and the setting shines via character archetypes, with most characters based in the city’s thriving entertainment industry. L.M. Chilton, Swiped (Gallery) Another send-off of modern dating, this time with an extra-fun twist! Chilton’s unlucky-in-love heroine finds herself under suspicion of murder after the shocking demise of multiple men with whom she’s matched. Who is the culprit killing off all these (admittedly mediocre) dating prospects? And why are they so determined to pin the blame on her? Julie Mae Cohen, Bad Men (The Overlook Press) What a delightfully weird book. Bad Men continues the “sympathetic feminist serial killer” trend that I noted last year, and adds the hope for a happily ever after to the mix. When serial-killing socialite Saffy Huntley-Oliver meets her perfect man, she’s ready to engineer whatever machinations are necessary to draw him in as a potential mate, but she’s going to have to figure out the balance between her new lover and her old hobbies. Don’t worry, the dog doesn’t die. Some people do, of course. But no dogs! Elle Marr, The Alone Time (Thomas and Mercer) Elle Marr’s consistently chilling and insightful psychological thrillers have been growing in repute for some time, so I’m glad I finally dived into her latest and found it to be just as good as I’d hoped. Violet and Fiona are two sisters who survived a horrific plane crash in childhood and spent months defying death in the wilderness. They’ve always said their parents died instantly in the crash, and they’ve always been suspected of hiding some details. When a new documentary crew starts digging, the grown-up sisters must confront their own traumas and hope to keep the real story hidden. This book also confirms my plan to NEVER go into the sky in a tiny, tiny plane piloted by a cranky relative. View the full article -
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10 New Books Coming Out this Week
A look at the week’s best new releases in crime fiction, nonfiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Abir Mukherjee, Hunted (Mulholland) “A pretty much flawless thriller, Hunted works on every level imaginable. Terrific characters are subtly and mercilessly pushed along by a plot as propulsive as it is constantly surprising.” –Lee Child John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness (Atria/Emily Bestler) “Connolly is a first-rate storyteller, and the Parker novels have always been excellent, but there’s something different about this one. The darkness that permeates the series feels darker here, as though Connolly is conjuring up an evil we’ve not seen before. This one will leave readers breathless and shaken—which is, after all, just what the author’s fans expect.” – Booklist Mailan Doquang, Blood Rubies (Mysterious Press) “An intricate plan in a far-off city to snatch some priceless gems. What could possibly go wrong?…A crisp caper whose detailed setting is its biggest attraction.” –Kirkus Reviews Marjorie McCown, Star Struck (Crooked Lane) “Sorry, Sherlock. Detective work has nothing on the perils of costume design.” –Kirkus Reviews Andromeda Romano-Lax, The Deepest Lake (Soho) “All who enjoy writer-focused thrillers will be enthralled by Romano-Lax’s morally and intellectually intricate tale, while her fans will marvel at her versatility as she shifts from complexly imagined literary fiction like Annie and the Wolves (2021), to this psychologically and culturally spiky work of suspense.” –Booklist Sarina Bowen, The Five Year Lie (Harper Paperbacks) “Bowen . . . takes a confident step into the thriller genre with this engaging debut, which combines a fast pace and an intriguing plot with pointed commentary on the way useful technology can easily create a dangerous privacy nightmare. . . . An engaging and fast-paced thriller about the abuse of technology.” Debbie Babitt, The Man on the Train (Scarlet) “A mysterious woman on the train, a disappearing husband, and secrets from the past come together in this pulse-quickening ride. Babitt masterfully creates a narrative that explores the fragility of trust and poses the question of how well we really know those closest to us. THE MAN ON THE TRAIN will keep readers guessing until the final, shocking reveal.” –Liv Constantine Elise Juska, Reunion (Harper) “A pitch-perfect depiction of New England campus culture, COVID-era child-rearing and how the complexities of adulthood accumulate.” –People Emiko Jean, The Return of Ellie Black (Simon and Schuster) “Like Jessica Knoll, whose crime novels also revolve around missing girls, Jean focuses less on sensationalizing predators and more on the tragedy of a ‘frenzy of missing girls. They do not give answers. They do not speak of what has come to pass. They whisper: Find us. Please.’ Jean has written an impressive crime novel here…. An unexpected ending and a cadre of heroic female characters make Jean a crime writer to watch.” –Kirkus Reviews Jacob Kushner, Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants (Grand Central) “This fascinating book tells two stories: first, how a gang of East German thugs turned neo-Nazi ‘bomb tinkerers’ grew into a network of domestic terrorists, and second, how German authorities let them get away with murder. Jacob Kushner tells the story with cautious condemnation and intimate detail.” –Michael Scott Moore View the full article -
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Morally Ambiguous Antiheroes in Mysteries and Thrillers
An honorable serial killer. A hacker turned vigilante. A gentleman thief. Mysteries and thrillers are full of morally ambiguous antiheroes who challenge us to confront truths about human nature and undermine strict definitions of good and evil. From Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov to S. A. Cosby’s Beauregard, these compelling but deeply flawed characters operate outside the law, while also adhering to their own moral codes. One person’s hero is another person’s villain. Morally ambiguous characters capture this complexity, reminding us that the world is neither black nor white, but a slippery combination of both. A morally gray antihero anchors my debut, Blood Rubies, an international thriller set in the thrumming cities of New York and Bangkok. The book follows Rune Sarasin, a half American, half Thai jewel thief thrust into the unwanted role of savior after her latest heist goes sideways and her boyfriend’s sister vanishes from a Bangkok slum. I knew from the outset that I wanted my protagonist to straddle different worlds, not just racially and culturally, but also morally. Rune is an outsider in every sense of the word. Her white mother, her American upbringing, and her shaky grasp of the Thai language make her as alien in Bangkok as her Asian half makes her in the US. Rune is rebellious, self-serving, and blunt to the point of rudeness. These traits, along with her criminality, would seem to place her squarely in the villain camp. But Rune is more than the sum of her flaws and questionable actions, she’s also protective, fiercely loyal, and selfless in her efforts to save her loved ones. This combination of the good and the bad, of the admirable and the abhorrent, is precisely what makes Rune relatable. The sense that the Runes of the world are just like us, except more extreme, helps account for their enduring appeal. Morally ambiguous characters allow us to give up on the idea of moral purity without abandoning our sense of self as moral beings. Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter Morgan, bloodstain pattern analyst by day, serial killer by night, is a prime example. Dexter kills without legal authority or due process—and with immense pleasure! Thanks to his adoptive father, however, Dexter channels his homicidal impulses in a “positive” way by only killing violent criminals he believes escaped justice. Dexter’s strong moral code serves as a counterpoint to his decidedly immoral actions, compelling us to consider the ethics of vigilantism and the blurred lines between right and wrong. The same can be said of Lisbeth Salander, Stieg Larsson’s justice-seeking hacker who hunts down and violently punishes men who abuse women. Both Lindsay and Larsson foster empathy for their characters by highlighting their altruistic motives and the traumatic experiences fueling their misdeeds. Dexter was just a toddler when a drug dealer killed his mother and locked him in a crate with her dismembered body, while Lisbeth suffered repeated abuse at the hands of her father, her psychiatrist, and her court-appointed guardian. Empathizing with characters whose values don’t square with our moral precepts sends an important message: you don’t have to be a paragon of virtue to deserve understanding and forgiveness. If vigilantes are redeemable, then, surely, we are, too. As a writer and lover of thrillers, the allure of morally ambiguous characters lies in their potential for heightened suspense. Heroes behave in predictably heroic ways, exhibiting courage in the face of danger and selflessly putting the greater good ahead of their personal interests. Conversely, villains use manipulation, deceit, intimidation, violence, and other nefarious tactics to pursue their desires regardless of the harm it might bring to others. Although heroes and villains occupy opposite ends of the morality spectrum, they share several key traits, including a keen intelligence, determination, imagination, and, most important in this context, constancy. I never wonder if Jack Reacher will back down from a fight, or if Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles will wash their hands of a difficult case, despite being fully fleshed out by their authors. Their heroic attributes override whatever character flaws they might have. Similarly, I know that the Sandman will kill, that Adora Crellin will abuse her daughters, and that, if it weren’t for the creepy mask, Hannibal Lector would eat my face. Morally gray characters take away this certainty, building suspense into stories by keeping us guessing about what they’ll do next. Unrestrained by the moral code of conventional heroes, antiheroes zig when we expect them to zag, adding uncertainty to scenarios that might otherwise unfold in predictable ways. As a longtime fan of Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin stories, thieves are by far my favorite literary antiheroes and the direct inspiration for Rune. A witty, dapper, and charming master of disguise, Lupin navigates the world according to his own moral compass, only stealing from the rich, redistributing wealth to the poor, and always being a gentleman of his word. Contemporary authors have also fueled my love for contradictory characters. A recent standout is Grace Li, whose New York Times bestseller, Portrait of a Thief, tells the story of five young Chinese Americans hired to steal back looted art from world-class museums. Li’s characters are not just motivated by a $50 million reward, but also by a deep desire to combat the legacy of colonialism and to right historical wrongs. Similarly, Beauregard “Bug” Montage in Cosby’s award-winning Blacktop Wasteland resumes his life of crime both to save his family from financial ruin and for the thrill of being the best getaway driver on the East Coast. The popularity of Li’s and Cosby’s books, both of which are being adapted for the screen, speaks to the continued appeal of the antihero archetype. Love to hate them? Hate to love them? When it comes to antiheroes, you’re sure to do both. *** View the full article -
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Write to Pitch 2024 - June
Assignment #1: “A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live?” A girl and a boy from different classes must escape an oppressive society that aims to control and torment them so they can finally be truly themselves. Assignment #2: Oriana must face a few antagonists and one main force. The first antagonist is Odon, a half-blood tyrant who threatens her life and the lives of those she cares about. He at first appears as a God-like force to Oriana, until she learns of his true nature as an actual person. She constantly questions if he can read her thoughts and is watching over her. He becomes her own conscience. Then she faces individual antagonists throughout her journey who force her to reflect on her “goodness.” Azura causes her to question herself as the protagonist of her own story because to the rebels she is an enemy. Her sister Lenora is an antagonist who gives her up to the authorities at the University. We see through her eyes how each individual in a corrupt society can become an antagonist through their limited perspective and depending on the agenda of those in power. Assignment #3: Oriana’s Eyes: Book One of the Great Oak Trilogy Oriana’s Rebirth The Half-Blood’s Destiny Assignment #4: 1984 by George Orwell but make it a YA fantasy novel. This story is The Giver meets The Hunger Games, meets Romeo and Juliet. Perfect for readers who loved Delirium, Divergent, The Cure and The Selection. Assignment #5: A girl questions the inescapable oppressive University and is drawn to the secrets that a forbidden young man can offer her about the outside world. As their Rebirth draws nearer a secret transformation could be their one opportunity to overthrow Odon and free her people from his tyrant grasp. Assignment #6 Oriana is a pureblood Winglet who has grown up under Odon’s rule. Her existence was confined to the University where purity and obedience are commended. Her conflict begins when she meets Dorian, a forbidden half-blood boy who shows her a world outside the University’s walls. She struggles with her awakening love and the reality and truth of the world she lives in. The more she learns about the world beyond the University, the more she realizes that escaping is only a small piece of the puzzle. When Oriana finally escapes and goes from being the highest revered race to the enemy, she must face the truth about her people and how they have been treating those “beneath” them. She also must face that everything she grew up learning was a lie and propaganda. Assignment #6 Part 2: The secondary conflict that Oriana faces is that although she has escaped there are others still trapped inside the University and under Odon’s control. She must now join in the fight to overthrow Odon and free her friends. This is at great risk to her own life and freedom. Similar to Plato’s cave scenario, Oriana escapes and becomes enlightened. She then must return to the cave to try and save the others. Assignment #7: Oriana’s Eyes takes place on an imaginary planet that is being controlled by half-blood tyrants. Oriana's world is much smaller, she has no idea what the outside world is facing. Her perspective is limited to the inside of the University, ruled by Odon. A University is usually known to be a place of education, instead Odon's University is a place of mind control and oppression with the illusion that it is teaching valuable lessons. The University is stark white and futuristic in its cold, minimalistic design. The physical coldness of the stone and metal keeps its students on edge and uncomfortable. They are forced to be on high alert constantly to maintain obedience. Everything in the University reminds students of the importance of purity. They are divided by their race to maintain this purity. The modern design also defies the chaotic randomness of nature. It shows the need for control and order that Odon is trying to force on his subjects. The University represents the desire for perceived perfection through sameness, repetition, and order. Rather than uniqueness and diversity. The University has one place of escape, a garden, walled in by protective hedges. This is a stark contrast to the University and the natural world, which Oriana desperately yearns for. She fears making a mistake and stepping out of line, which is wearing her down. When Oriana is captured and brought into the caves beneath the University, she is trapped in darkness physically, but ironically she wakes up to the illusion that the University provided. Whereas the brightness of the University should coincide with clarity, it was blinding. The caves represent a modality to enlightenment. She finds herself in the underbelly of the true darkness that Odon was trying to hide. Rather than being oppressed though, Oriana is reborn. When she escapes the caves it’s like she is awakening to the truth and seeing the light for the first time. She finds herself in the wilds of nature, which includes variation, disorder, and death. Undesirables are no longer hidden away. Life becomes raw, honest, and real. Lastly, Oriana is introduced to the Great Oak. This is the location of the rebels' hideout. The Great Oak is a massive tree with an extensive network of platforms and homes set among its branches. The Great Oak represents both a family tree and the tree of life. Oriana finds a new life and is awakened to the deep knowledge of her ancestors at the Great Oak. It holds the connection between the people and their planet as well as the perfect place to remain hidden. In some ways, the Great Oak is both a setting and main character in the book. She is the embodiment of Mother Nature and is personified through the love of her people. -
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Write to Pitch 2024 - June
The Act of Story Statement (Assignment 1) An out of work seaman needs to survive a dangerous journey across Asia without financial assistance to complete a mission he has not chosen, and report about it. The Antagonist Plots the Point (Assignment 2) Levi Savage overcomes his and Luddington’s status as alternates on the mission by stealing attention and promoting his own importance at the expense the quieter Elam Luddington. Savage’s more wordy style nearly erases Luddington’s presence. But Luddington finds a comeback only to meet new antagonism in the strangers he is now dependent on. Conjuring Your Breakout Title (Assignment 3) Misrepresented: The Secret 1850s Asia Journal Misrepresented The Secret 1850s Asia Journal The Writing Seaman The Unsigned Letter The Accidental Letter Deciding Your Genre and Approaching Comparables (Assignment 4) Narrative Nonfiction History American Zion by Benjamin Park meets The Anarchy by William Dalrymple American Zion: A New History of Mormonism by Benjamin Park is a social exploration of the history of the Mormon faith and how it shaped the United States. Park critiques the faith while humanizing it in the context of evolving American socio-political forces. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple is a history of the political chaos of the British East India Company’s blunders in 19th century India. Dalrymple captures the humanity, sometimes comedy, but also the misjudgments of the British and South Asians as they struggle to maintain a role on the continent. Core Wound and the Primary Conflict (Assignment 5) A former seaman seeks to regain purpose after his chosen career comes to a halt by joining the Mormons, who in turn send him on a dangerous mission without money to Asia and forget him. Other Matters of Conflict: Two More Levels (Assignment 6) Inner Conflict Elam Luddington is meant to preach as a Mormon missionary in Asia but he fights the stigma of being chosen as an alternate and lacks the religious zeal of his counterparts. He finds the social and political oddities of Asia more interesting than his purpose, which further relegates him in the others’ eyes. He must find something to report that matters and may redeem his role on the mission. He finds a mid-ranking British sergeant with just such a meaning and purpose for his writings, though no one else understands what the import is or why he’s chosen a different path. Secondary Conflict Luddington determines his work has been fruitless and wants to return home but the journey is still far and he has already begged his way through the last days in Siam. Merchants and other Christian missionaries see his rough sea voyages as an ill omen for his conversion to Mormonism and won’t support him. He is conflicted by his status and values as a missionary and the rougher crowd of opium dealers and sex workers willing to sustain him. His status among the British in Hong Kong is too low to access the assistance he needs to cross the ocean back to California. Until someone changes their mind. The Incredible Importance of Setting (Assignment 7) In 1854 it is not a given yet that Britain’s empire would follow the sun around the globe. The British East India Company still generally sees itself as a company in bed with, but separate, from the crown back home in England. Asian leaders are now making the decisions as to how they will engage with the British. For some there’s still time to find a path that preserves their sovereignty and remain on the throne. Siam is in the throes of these critical choices. Where most histories divorce Asian countries from their neighbors, this one travels through multiple countries, and their dilemmas, all watching each others’ moves to model a response to the British. And now we know that due to an unsigned letter from Elam Luddington Siam’s king takes an unexpected turn. Monsoon winds and ferocious storms at sea nearly drown Elam Luddington and alter his path. His lack of funds and the difficulty of the journey leads him to engage with society, which he might not have, from the ships’ crews to the British governors of Pinang, Singapore, and Hong Kong, to American diplomats about to sign the treaties that will become infamous. It’s this setting that allows him to write what no other first person historical journal has recorded about this tenuous time. The dismissal of his Mormon identity and the lack of success on his mission, from both Mormons and non-Mormons alike, has kept his writings from taking any role in mapping out this history with otherwise few reliable sources. Yet it is also the influence of Mormon leaders who require him to write the detailed and one of a kind reports that, as a seaman in his prior life, he would not have. We see Asia in the 19th century like we never have before—some of which has only been imagined—but until now not with an authentic primary source. In as much color and drive as the stormy seas and a backdrop of several Asian countries deliver, Luddington’s journal surprisingly survives, and for the first time, comes alive in this narrative history. -
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The Importance of Place
Much writing advice often ignores place, but I agree with Eudora Welty, who stresses that place is as central to fiction as character and plot. She wrote the most important essay on the subject, “Place in Fiction,” in 1955, and it is still crucial. For her, place is a "named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced …” In our lives where we are when something happens involves a myriad of associations. So it should be in our fictions. The fundamental difference is that in life we have years to gather those associations. When writing a story, we have only a few pages to suggest the relationships of a place to people and their actions. While references to the place setting can occur throughout a story, I’m going to focus on specific paragraphs that establish place in selected stories and consider their method of doing so. Note that in each one the place isn’t merely described. The paragraph reveals an attitude toward it and something about its role in the action of the story. Alice Munro, “Runaway” Up until three years ago, Carla had never really looked at mobile homes. She hadn’t called them that, either. Like her parents, she would have thought the term “mobile home” pretentious. Some people lived in trailers, and that was all there was to it. One trailer was no different from another. When she moved in here, when she chose this life with Clark, she began to see things in a new way. After that, it was only the mobile homes that she really looked at, to see how people had fixed them up—the kind of curtains they had hung, the way they had painted the trim, the ambitious decks or patios or extra rooms they had built on. She could hardly wait to get to such improvements herself. In this case, the mobile homes—trailers—are presented as more of a concept, objects named rather than described. What we learn about Carla is that in choosing to be with Clark she has experienced a radical life change. Yet her eagerness for improvements indicates how much she wants to recapture aspects of her old life. The issue of the story revolves around whether she will. Tessa Hadley, “Because the Night” Kristen stepped backward out of the light, into the shadow of the oil tank: no one saw her vanish. From her new perspective, the purple clematis flowers growing thick on the trellis loomed suddenly momentous against the party glow; the grown-up talk dropped into blurred, lively noise, as if she had crossed a frontier. On her side of it was the night quiet, a bird blundering in the bushes, a dank breath of earth, a rattle when her skirt caught on the shiny laurel leaves. She hadn’t brought out her torch; when she turned to follow the path back past the bike shed into the wood, the blackness at first was like a wall preventing her. After a few moments’ staring, it melted into grey, seeped into by the light of the party behind. Imagining being blind, with her eyes strained open and her hands feeling out all round her, lifting her knees high in case she stumbled, she made her way cautiously past the shed and then on into the denser dark of the wood. Tom would have remembered the torch. Unlike the Munro paragraph, the Hadley is visualized quite closely as an actual experience in a very specific setting of objects, shadings or color, and movements of a person in that setting. But like Munro’s Carla, though the circumstance remains to be explained, Kristen is also changing her life, if only temporarily (we don’t know), by choosing to abandon the glow of the party and seek the nighttime darkness of the wood. The fact that Tom would have approached the situation very differently suggests that Kristen is getting away from him too. What is she looking for? What will she find? In the following examples the characters are also experiencing new realities but rather through circumstances rather than a form of choice. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, “Audition” He was telling me where to turn. Turn here. Turn there. Left. Right. Right. I was entering territory with which I was unfamiliar, because I’d grown up cushy. We drove beneath an overpass that led into a down-and-out neighborhood of weather-beaten, two-story, redbrick homes, a hundred of them in a row, every one identical, just as the houses in my father’s subdivision were identical, but at the other end of the economic spectrum. This was a neighborhood of odd jobs and no help, where people shopped for dinner at the convenience store. Here is another example of a character experiencing a new reality through a new place. In contrast to Carla and Kristen, this unnamed narrator has not made a choice in advance but rather is under someone else’s guidance. In this unfamiliar neighborhood the homes and lives are still identical but in a very different manner from the narrator’s home. All three characters are principals in stories that uproot them from the familiar and thrust them into new situations that turn out to be a form of test. Ursula K, LeGuin, “Pity and Shame” “His first afternoon in Goldorado, he was not feeling encouraged about his stay there. Ross, the company’s local boss, was a buttoned-up, all-business man. The kid they’d found for him to rent rooms from was unfriendly. The town had popped up on the strength of a couple of shallow-lode mines and was giving out along with them; the four mines he had been sent to inspect were almost certainly played out or barren holes in the ground. A lot of downtown windows were boarded up, bleak even in the blaze of midsummer. A hound dog lay dead asleep in the middle of Main Street. It looked like a few weeks could be a long time there.” The man, it is clear, is in this town for work and is in the process of discovering what it is like, an impression being developed through an accumulation of reinforcing details—unapproachable people, barren mines, and a failing downtown, symbolized most concretely by the dead asleep dog. Unlike the previous paragraphs, this one provides little about the character who has been sent here, other than his apprehension. The clue of the final sentence suggests that he is about to face something unexpected in this dead, and perhaps deadly, place. Weike Wang, “Omakase” That was something the woman had to get used to about New York. In Boston, the subway didn’t get you anywhere, but the stations were generally clean and quiet and no one bothered you on the actual train. Also, there were rarely delays due to people jumping in front of trains. Probably because the trains came so infrequently that there were quicker ways to die. In New York, the subway generally got you where you needed to go, but you had to endure a lot. For example, by the end of her first month the woman had already seen someone pee in the corner of a car. She had been solicited for money numerous times. And, if she didn’t have money, the same person would ask her for food or a pencil or a tissue to wipe his nose. On a trip into Brooklyn on the L, she had almost been kicked in the face by a pole-dancing kid. She’d refused to give that kid any money. Here too place is established by contrast, although the LeGuin just implies that the man is used to something very different. Wang’s women, also in a new place, is able to know it by enumerating all that is the opposite of the old place, specifically the nature of the two different subway systems. Her memory of the one in Boston is of a directionless calm; New York is purposeful but disturbing and threatening. Although the Wang paragraph does not specify details of the woman’s personal situation, it suggests dislocation and fearfulness, and perhaps an impending confrontation. Sigrid Nunez, “The Plan” Where they lived people didn’t walk. He was sure he’d never seen anyone in his neighborhood out walking unless it was with a dog. Again, a lone man would have stuck out. He would have felt too conspicuous strolling through the streets. The town had a park but it was small, and since lately it had become the turf of drug addicts it was often cruised by the cops. In the city, on the other hand, you could walk forever, invisible, unhassled. It was a mystery to him how all the bustle only made it easier for him to think. Although the locations of these streets are in an unidentified own and city, the walking situation is similar to the contrast of the Boston and New York subways. But unlike the Wang where the city is threatening, in the Nunez the man feels safe and free in the city, able to think as he walks. It’s the empty neighborhoods of the town that give him unease. The Nunez paragraph suggests that he will encounter a test, perhaps a dangerous one, here. Although I chose these examples of establishing place at random, I was surprised when I read them closely to discover that each uses a contrasting place—indicated or implied—to help specify the nature of the new place a character is in, with a contrast that is essential to the plot of the story. I’m reminded of John Gardner’s simplification of all story plots , that they boil down to two variations: 1. A hero goes on a journey, 2. A stranger comes to town. Some have argued that they are opposite sides of the same coin, depending on the perspective. The heroes of all these place paragraphs are going on some variation of a journey, and they are strangers once they get there. That provides the basic tension of their stories. -
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Falling Hard for The Fall Guy
I don’t usually include personal anecdotes in film reviews, lest they detract from the critical discussion at hand, but I’d just like to open this review by saying that I brought my 87-year-old Croatian grandmother with me to my advance screening of The Fall Guy in IMAX, and after we got her situated in her ADA seat and watched the trailers and the movie itself started rolling, revealing a medley of impressive stunts, she leaned over and said, in a very matter-of-fact way, “this is an action movie.” The Fall Guy has a lot going on, but the most important thing about it (indeed, the thing about itself that it most wants you to know) is that it is an action movie and that action movies are made not merely with actors and directors, but entire teams of stunt performers who risk their lives and limbs for movie magic, and do so for comparatively minuscule credit. The film is directed by David Leitch, who, prior to his career directing many memorable blockbuster action movies, including John Wick, Hobbs & Shaw, Deadpool 2, and Bullet Train, was a stunt performer and coordinator, himself. Most action movies have the feel of being driven by narrative, with stuntwork bolstering and buttressing and filling out the story. The Fall Guy, which was written by Drew Pearce and Glen A. Larson (based on the 80s TV series of the same name), feels like the opposite kind of affair: one in which the narrative exists to connect stunt setpiece to stunt setpiece to stunt setpiece. This isn’t to say that the narrative of The Fall Guy isn’t enjoyable or doesn’t make sense (because it is, and it does), but to underscore that The Fall Guy is, first and foremost, a passionate, high-octane, two-hour love letter to movie stunts and the people who make them. And more! So much more. Here’s some of the more. Our story follows Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling, locked and loaded and endearing as ever), a stuntman of many talents who falls off the map after an on-set accident results in a grievous injury. But he finds himself back in the game when he’s given the chance to help out on his ex-girlfriend Jody’s new sci-fi film, Metalstorm, a sandy, outer-space spectacle billed as “High Noon at the edge of the galaxy.” Jody (Emily Blunt) is still mad that Colt broke contact during his convalescence and resulting depression; he is still carrying a burning torch for her, upset that he didn’t do more to hold on to her during their relationship, so he is determined to be there for her, professionally, as she directs her first feature film. But he’s not simply going to help out with stunts; the film’s producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham) has called Colt to set because the film’s star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), has apparently gone missing. No one on set knows this yet; they’re filming the action stuff and Tom doesn’t do his own stunts, so he’s not supposed to be around anyway. Gail promises Colt that he’ll be saving Jody’s movie if he finds Tom, and all Colt wants is a chance to make things up to Jody, so he agrees. But he gets more than he bargained for when mysterious, armed bruisers start coming after him, leading to a series of dazzling, jaw-dropping chase, fight, and stunt sequences—sequences which only get more and more fun as Colt starts assembling a team of helpers, including Metalstorm’s stunt director Dan Tucker (Winston Duke), Tom’s plucky assistant Alma (Stephanie Hsu), and a well-trained, French-speaking attack dog named Jean-Claude (played, seemingly, by a dog named Jean-Claude and his puppet stunt double). Meanwhile, Jody is happy to have Colt back in her life; his supportive energy provides her the inspiration to fix the film’s difficult third act. She doesn’t know that, by night, he’s taking punches and getting the stuffing kicked out of him to try to save her movie; but he’s committed to her and her work all the way, and she values this. That’s the thing about The Fall Guy; it becomes more than a movie about the undersung, hidden stunt-makers; it becomes a movie about movie-makers, writ-large. The film balances its face-value, hyper-kinetic, thoroughly cinematic diegetic action bits with other sequences that are solely, reflexively devoted to the behind-the-scenes ecosystem of film shoots. The film offers multiple peeks behind the curtain, so to speak, of making a movie like this; not only do we see the stunt performers with their cables on and watch the giant puffy landing mats get unrolled, but we also watch Jody literally direct her movie. We watch her design the shots and operate the camera, we go inside the editing room with Jody and the editor, looking through takes, we meet the writers, visual effects artists, DPs, ADs, and PAs who make the film possible. Thus, even though The Fall Guy technically gives us a single action hero (and a single romantic couple) to root for, it also effectively conveys a sense of ensemble achievement. We go with the crew to an after-work karaoke outing. We see crew members proudly wear their souvenir production jackets. The Fall Guy is about being on a team and loving that team. Movies like this (smart, funny blockbusters with wide theatrical releases) don’t get made like they used to, but they should. Much like the Mission: Impossible franchise’s commitment to impressive practical effects and denunciation of creepy human-replacing, AI technologies, The Fall Guy has a lot to say about how films are (and should be) personal. Not only do movies mean things to the characters in the film, but movies are also (the film argues) at their best when they are made by people, people who put in the hard work to make something as entertaining as possible. After the fallout from Tom’s disappearance starts hitting Jody’s set, she is given the out of leaving the shoot early to go rest on a beach, letting the producer call the rest of the shots, and letting the VFX crew take care of the rest of the stunts, and she balks at the very idea. Right on! The Fall Guy is a valuable exhibit in the case for bringing back fun movies—bringing them to theaters, and to fruition, more generally. And it’s great to watch a movie where you can sense star power. These days, we don’t have a lot of compelling movie stars holding down the fort of commercial film, but Ryan Gosling is a good choice for a movie like this. He, fresh off Barbie, is just as delightful a romantic comedy lead as he is a convincing action heavy. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, has natural comic timing, and can unleash a very good scream. The Fall Guy is good at balancing different kinds of “funny,” from recurring gags to witty banter to quality throwaway jokes. I laughed very hard, at one point, when Colt is mistaken as an intruder by Tom’s girlfriend (Teresa Palmer) while he is in Tom’s house, investigating his disappearance. “I’m on Metalstorm too,” he tells her, trying to get her to lower her weapon. “Liar!” she screams. “We’re on Metalstorm ONE.” Gosling yells back at her, with palpable frustration, “I MEANT ‘ALSO!'” I should also add that Gosling and Blunt have charming chemistry, building a movie-inspired, movie-adjacent love story that works on its own, too. I genuinely wanted them to be able to work things out. I have few slight issues with some aspects, but I don’t want to spoil anything in listing them. I will say that, when the villain of the movie appears, we don’t get to feel their threat as powerfully or ride that actor’s charisma as much as we should. It’s always a little bit of a letdown when the heroes are so lovable and the villains turn out not to match them in intensity. But this is a quibble. The whole thing is a rollicking good time, pure cinema. “I love when I get to call a movie ‘pure cinema,'” I said, as I left the theater, pausing to ask my grandmother, “Did you like it?” She responded, “it was entertainment!” View the full article -
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Alaska’s Long History of Serial Killers
From the time gold was discovered here in 1871, Alaska has been a magnet for a certain type of risk-taker. Daredevil fortune seekers came, seduced by the area’s seemingly infinite riches – miners, traders, trappers, and crab fishermen all answering Alaska’s siren song. Throughout Alaska’s recorded history, yet another kind of risk-taker has gravitated to The Last Frontier. Lured by the vastness of the terrain, its Wild West lawlessness, its endless winter nights, or all of the above – serial killers have left their mark. I set my debut mystery/thriller Cold To The Touch in this locale because of its unique, stark beauty and its ability to harbor the darkest and most sinister of predators. Edward Krause, Alaska’s first known serial killer, is said to be responsible for the deaths of at least ten men between 1912 and 1915, killing them for their real estate holdings and bank balances. His true identity was Edward Klompke, a U.S. Army deserter. He was sentenced to hang but escaped two days before his execution. He met his end when a homesteader shot and killed him for a $1000 reward. Klutuk, “The Mad Trapper of Bristol Bay,” was a Yupi’k trapper named for a small tributary of the Nushagak River in Western Alaska. Between 1919 and 1931, he stalked trappers and prospectors in the wilderness between Cook Inlet and the Kuskokwim River. Fiercely territorial, he supposedly killed twenty or more men he perceived as infringing on his domain. After an exhaustive manhunt that covered several thousand square miles, a U.S. Marshal found remains he claimed to be Klutuk in a cabin near the Mulchatna River. Harvey Carignan killed 58-year-old Laura Showalter in the Territory of Alaska in 1949, while stationed in the U.S. Army in Anchorage. Although Showalter was his only Alaska victim, Carignan also killed two young women in Washington – one who answered a “help wanted” ad he posted for his gas station – and two women in Minnesota. He died in prison in Minnesota. Thomas Richard Bunday was serving at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks when he murdered five girls and young women between 1979 and 1981. With no physical evidence to hold him in Alaska, Bunday was able to transfer to Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas. He finally confessed in 1988, but killed himself before Alaskan detectives could apprehend him. Joshua Alan Wade claimed to have killed his first victim on an Anchorage bike trail when he was fourteen. He went on to kill four more people, including his neighbor, a nurse practitioner. After forcing her to give up her ATM and PIN, he shot her in the head and burned her body. He is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Indiana. James Dale Ritchie started killing in 2016, when he shot a homeless woman and a male acquaintance. Twenty-six days later he shot a young man, presumably for his bicycle, which he rode away from the scene. A month later, he killed a homeless man and a young environmental activist out on a late-night bike ride. Ritchie himself was killed during a gunfight with Anchorage police. Robert Christian Hansen was the most notorious of the Alaskan serial killers, called the “Butcher Baker” because he owned a bakery a short distance from Merrill Field, where he kept his plane. From 1971 to 1983, he abducted, raped and murdered at least seventeen Alaskan girls and women, many of whom were exotic dancers or sex workers. Some he flew out to a remote location in his Piper Super Cub and hunted them in the wilderness with a semi-automatic rifle. When Hansen was apprehended, investigators found an aeronautical chart with thirty-seven “x” marks on it, leading officials to believe that he was responsible for far more deaths than he claimed. Hansen was only formally charged with the murders of four victims – of these, only “Eklutna Annie” has not yet been identified. He died of natural causes in 2014 while serving a life sentence. Long-haul trucker John Joseph Fautenberry confessed to killing six people across five states, including Jefferson Diffee, a miner at the Greens Creek silver mine near Juneau. After pleading guilty to killing Diffee and given a 99-year prison term in Alaska, he was extradited to Ohio. Here he was sentenced to death for previously killing and robbing Joseph Daron, Jr., a Good Samaritan who had stopped to offer him a ride. Fautenberry was executed there by lethal injection in 2009. Although Israel Keyes is believed to have committed multiple murders from 2001 to 2012, he has identified only three by name: William and Lorraine Currier of Essex, Vermont, and Samantha Koenig, a barista in Anchorage. In 2007, after living for six years on the Makah Reservation, Keyes left Washington state for Alaska where he started a contracting business. It was during one of his many trips to the Lower 48 that he meticulously stalked William and Lorraine Currier. Two years prior to the killing of the Curriers, Keyes had buried near their home a five-gallon drum of guns, ammunition, a silencer, zip ties, and duct tape. Using the contents of this “murder kit”, he tortured and murdered the Curriers, a middle-aged couple he had never met before, and left them to rot in an abandoned farmhouse. The Curriers’ remains were never found. Eighteen-year-old Samantha Koenig was a barista at Common Grounds coffee stand when Keyes abducted her at gunpoint on February 1, 2012. He took her to a shed just a few feet from his home where he sexually assaulted and killed her. Then he left on a two-week cruise in the Gulf of Mexico. When he returned, he applied makeup to Koenig’s face, sewed her eyes open with fishing line and photographed her with a four-day old issue of the Anchorage Daily News to make it appear she was still alive. He posted a ransom note demanding $30,000 in a local park, after which he dismembered Koenig’s body and disposed of it in Matanuska Lake, north of Anchorage. Officials tracked the use of the dead woman’s ATM card as Keyes moved across the southwestern United States. He was finally arrested in Texas and extradited to Alaska. He died by suicide on December 2, 2012. Keyes was born in Utah to a Mormon family. Fautenberry was from Connecticut, Bunday from Tennessee, Hansen from Iowa. For these killers, Alaska was as far as they could go – literally and figuratively. Alaska encompasses 365 million acres – only 160,000 of which have been settled by humans. Only 1580 sworn law enforcement officers safeguard this landmass, twice the size of Texas (2024 World Population Review). Maybe these killers believed their unthinkable crimes would be undiscovered or unpunished in this sparsely policed wilderness. Victims are lost here as well, never to be found, like so many of Hansen’s and Keyes’ casualties. Bodies decompose, undisturbed, in pristine lakes or are scattered by animals, strewn into the darkness of the long Alaska nights. *** View the full article -
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A Host of New YA Mysteries, Thrillers, and Horror Fiction
One of the most creative avenues for genre exploration today is found in young adult fiction. The following new and upcoming releases are distinguished by nimble use of tropes, deep love of references, intricate plotting, and a passion for justice. They are also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, incredibly entertaining. God speed, ye readers. Tyffany Neuhauser, Not Dead Enough (Viking, January 23) This novel uses the undead as a perfect metaphor for PTSD—the main character is literally haunted by her abusive ex-boyfriend, a duplicitous soul whose harmful ways were invisible to all other observers, and a brutal confrontation with this zombified incarnation of trauma is necessitated in order to move on. Sami Ellis, Dead Girls Walking (Amulet Books, March 26) Sapphic romance and serial killers at summer camp! Sami Ellis seems to have included every trope I have on my checklist, and they all work together seamlessly for an irrepressibly entertaining horror experience. Ream Shukairy, Six Truths and a Lie (Little Brown, March 12) Shukairy’s haunting noir of justice delayed and denied is an essential read for our times. Six Muslim teenagers are targeted by police after a Muslim student gathering on a beach is interrupted by mysterious explosions. Shukairy divides the narrative between these disparate narrators, with slow reveals leading to maximum emotional impact. The novel’s scenes of protest are especially evocative given recent events in which student voices have been violently repressed. Freddie Kölsch, Now, Conjurers (Union Square, June 4) New voice Freddie Kolsch has written a queer horror novel for the ages, in which a charismatic quarterback’s failed quest for absolution is the catalyst for an epic confrontation between his coven and his killer. Not to be a pest, but you must read this book. No excuses. Now you must be wondering, why does every sentence in this blurb begin with an “n”? No cheating—you’ll have to pick up the book to find out yourself. Tess Sharpe, The Girl in Question (Little Brown, May 14) In this intricately plotted nesting doll of a thriller, the sequel to her novel The Girls I’ve Been, a camping trip meant for solace instead goes horribly awry. Nora, Sharpe’s “girl in question,” was raised by a con artist mother and broke free from her family only through turning snitch against her violent stepdad. Now, he’s out of jail, she’s in the wilderness with her closest friends, and someone’s on their trail. Sharpe has been a personal favorite for some time, and this latest novel should continue her journey into becoming a household name. Joelle Wellington, The Blonde Dies First (S&S, July 30) I loved Joelle Wellington’s debut thriller with its epic party gone terribly wrong, and she continues to wreak gleeful havoc with traditional tropes in her new thriller. This one features an epic summer party interrupted by a demon hell-bent on picking off guests. Gigi Griffis, We Are the Beasts (Delacorte, December 10) Gigi Griffis breathes new life and intrigue into the historical tale of the Beast of Gévaudan, the mythical monster blamed for a rural murder spree in Ancien Regime France, as two teen girls take advantage of the chaos to fake the deaths of their nearest and dearest and thus save them from more human terrors. Griffis has an eye for historical detail and a deft hand when it comes to plotting. View the full article -
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Monster Moms: Finding My Way Back to Horror
Not coincidentally, I quit my great love, horror movies, right around the time I became a mom. Perhaps it’s because new terrors haunted me: SIDS and school shootings, poison in Halloween candy, toxins in the water, plastic in our bloodstream, creepy lingerers in Golden Gate Park, a planet on fire, a child poisoned, a child with no future, a child lost forever. That was enough horror for me at that point in my life. Or maybe it’s because becoming a mom brought to my attention how many horror movies make moms into monsters. Moms are the ugly reason behind Jason and Norman Bates and Carrie. They’re the evil antagonists in Ma (2019), Mama (2013), and Mother’s Day (1980/2010). It’s easy to demonize mothers, to make them the villains, the origin stories behind killers, the lost souls who hit their breaking point, turn their torment on others. And sure they have power, but isn’t it convenient, always blaming mom? Horror movies put a microscopic lens on our troubles, reflecting them back at us with heightened paranoia and terror. But some things aren’t all that exaggerated for the screen. In the horror world, as in ours, if you’re not a perfect mom, what are you? You must be a monster. As a new mother, I didn’t need the reminder, thank you. So, I gave up on horror for a time, turning my back on monsters. I told myself, hilariously, You’ll never be one of them. But in the horror that was lockdown, we were all on the verge of monsterdom. I was a single mom alone with my kids, a classic horror setup, very cabin in the woods even if we lived in the city. It was sweet, the way my kids wanted to sleep with me, but we were together all day. And at night? We were a pile of bodies, me in the middle, our limbs indistinguishable, breathing in each other’s hot exhales. One night, unable to sleep, feeling very much confined, I slipped out of bed and felt an old, familiar urge, so I turned on the TV, found the first horror movie that didn’t look terrible, The Babadook (2014). In one of the opening scenes, a single mom, Amelia, is in bed with her young son, Samuel. He’s got a leg thrown over her body, a hand at her neck; he grinds his teeth audibly. She escapes to the edge of the bed, lying there uncomfortable and sleepless. I understood her immediately. As a single mom, I have room for kids in my bed, but having room doesn’t mean I always have space. During an especially grabby hug, Amelia shouts at her son, “Don’t do that!” Too much, too close, the heat of a small human body that can shift from warm to oppressive in an instant. My first taste of monsterdom came years earlier, well before lockdown, when my neurodivergent preschooler would struggle at school. In The Babadook Samuel faces similar troubles. A couple of stuffy administrators tell Amelia: “The boy has significant behavioral problems,” to which Amelia replies: “Please stop calling him the boy.” Raising a child on the spectrum, I have sat across from many teachers and administrators with similar attitudes: You’re on your own. I’d have to walk out of that office, past the parents who appeared smug at the periphery of my rage. Were they really smug, or was my vision distorted by my monstrosity? I’d spend hours pondering this question, whether I was imagining that smugness—a horror movie in the making. Parenting shouldn’t be a solitary act, but when your child misbehaves publicly, there’s no one more judgmental than other parents. It’s easy to turn inward, to make your world smaller, to tread in shrinking circles, and isolation is one of the key ingredients to horror. For a time, I gave in, not accepting my monstrosity so much as reveling in it. I gave myself weird haircuts and wore monster-sized clothing and stopped smiling so much, and as a result people stopped smiling back at me. I’d hear about family parties to which my kids and I didn’t receive invitations and think, Fine, I can be a monster in private. Later in The Babadook, Samuel is uninvited to his cousin’s birthday party, a particular slight with an exquisite sting. He can’t go back to school, so Amelia and Samuel are alone in the house, listless until a mysterious book about a monster arrives. After reading it, Samuel warns Amelia not to let the monster in. But she does—she can’t help it—and the monster possesses her. After lockdown, I no longer had the ability to perform perfect, even if I wanted to. I’d spent too much time alone, embracing my monsterdom, to play pretend. So, when we all reemerged, I started talking about my fears openly, my frustrations, my pain, cracking jokes at my own expense and laughing too loudly, identifying the moms who laughed with me and making them my friends. Maybe it was lockdown, or perhaps it was just age, experience after experience settling on me, dust matter that I couldn’t wash away, but it occurred to me that I was neither perfect nor a monster; I was just a mom who was doing her best, and why wasn’t that enough? Now I’ve let my great love, horror movies, back into my life, though I still yearn for more movies that show the complexity of motherhood. More than that, I want a world that asks for less of mothers and offers more. But in the meantime, my neurodivergent child has become a teen, and she’s doing great. Great by a standard we’ve set, her and I. Other parents might think differently but that’s not my concern. I’m no longer shaken by their opinions about my kids or my parenting. The monster inside me sleeps, for now. But she’s there, always, if I need to call upon her. *** View the full article -
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Walking Through “Elevator to the Gallows”
April 2024 It is springtime in Paris. I am in Paris. I know now that this, what I am experiencing, is the perfect combination of a time and a place, a season and a city. It rains a lot, but only a little. The sun is chilly but the wind is warm. At lunchtime, I walk to the Place Dauphine, a shady courtyard on the west side of the Île de la Cité, the island in the Siene that bears up Notre Dame, listening to the hurried French of elderly couples. In the evenings, I stroll through the Latin Quarter, weaving around clusters of American students on study-abroad. I’m staying with a friend in an apartment in the 20th arrondissement, near Père Lachaise, the old cemetery. In a few days, I’ll be by myself in a hotel in the 16th, in Trocadero, across the river from the Eiffel Tower. I’m fond of the Metro, and the bus, but I’ll spend most of my time in Paris walking from neighborhood to neighborhood. I like to climb the hills, wander through the streets, feel the contours and furrows of the city in the soles of my feet. 29 Rue de Courcelles. Paris 8. I don’t walk near there, but it’s on my list of places to visit, if I can find the time. I don’t really spend much time in the 8th, partially because it’s crowded. I grew up in New York City, and it’s symptomatic of this geographic upbringing to develop a sort of psychosomatic skin allergy to throngs. I tend to shiver a lot in crowds. So, I avoid the Champs-Élysées and the Arc du Triomphe, shimmy north whenever I hit the Place de la Concorde. I never make it to Rue de Courcelles, even though I want to. Or I think I want to. In a way, I know that spot in Paris rather well already; it’s the setting for a favorite film, Louis Malle’s Ascenseur Pour L’Échafaud (1958). The film was re-titled Frantic for select audiences but is better known now with the title Elevator to the Gallows. It is a crisp, bleak, dreary film noir, black and white and morose, but also heartbreaking and gutting. I saw Elevator to the Gallows in college, homework for a course titled “Paris in Film,” a class whose enrollees, I imagine, expected a rosier overall patina in the assigned films. Instead, we watched Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), Alain Corneau’s Serie Noire (1979), Leos Carax’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Michael Haneke’s Code Inconnu (2000). The happiest film we watched was Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962). I think about this course, and Elevator to the Gallows, as I walk around Paris. I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. Perhaps there’s a simple reason (one character traverses the city on foot in most of her scenes). Perhaps I’m remembering it because it was the first time I was exposed to Paris as a city, rather than as a dream. The film tells the story of Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), a cool-headed businessmen who plans and executes the perfect murder. After pretending to leave for the day and then climbing back up into the building (on the outside), he sneaks back in, and kills his boss, Simon Carala (Jean Wall). See, Julien and Simon’s wife, Florence (Jeanne Moreau), are in love and they want Simon out of the way. But then, after Julien kills Simon, he gets trapped in an elevator on his way out of the building. Once planning to rendezvous with the newly widowed Florence, Julien now must spend the majority of the film desperately trying to free himself. After waiting a long while, Florence assumes she has been stood up by her lover and falls into a depressed stupor. She wanders through the city as a score from Miles Davis cries, non-diegetically, around her. But that’s not all. A young working-class couple, Veronique (Yori Bertin) and Louis (Georges Poujouly), steal Julien’s expensive car, which lies abandoned on the street. Because he leaves his identification in the car, the kids also steal his identity, spiriting away to a nearby motel and checking in under Julien’s name. There, they commit a terrible crime that ultimately leads the police back to the entrapped Julien, still frozen in his escape from the original murder. In Elevator to the Gallows, Malle illustrates that, regardless of one’s initial (physical and financial) place in society, personal misery is rampant and leads to selfishness, which in turn leads to cruelty. Moreover, the film says, it is impossible for anyone to truly escape who they are—a theme Malle particularly emphasizes by trapping his transgressors in torturous solitude across the isobaric regions of the city. The film takes place within three different spaces (three neighborhoods, three sets), but all of these characters are united by the single crime perpetrated by Julien against his innocent boss. Julien’s action, therefore, begins a chain-reaction of anguish that ripples through various degrees of people who know him, but also through various degrees of the city. Moreover, as the individuals least involved, Veronique and Louis attempt to get farther and farther away from Julien, by moving to the peripheries of Paris; their desperation to abandon their former lives grows stronger until they, in turn, commit a crime to do so—a crime that is on par with the murder Julien had committed in Paris. Therefore, Paris is symbolically a uniting force—a haunting being capable of reaching out to its exiting parts and drawing them back in, forcing them to reconcile with their both their past selves and the origin of their circumstance. Film noir is about solitude, bleakness… reaching for someone and failing to hold on, solving a mystery and finding out that the answer means nothing. It is often about the relationship between a solitary figure and a single, large impersonal environment. Usually a city. Sometimes, even Paris. In noir, despite traversing a place from end to end, it is often impossible to extricate oneself from certain troubles and futile to attempt to move to a better place; ultimately, attempting either thing can only contribute to more destruction in an otherwise depraved world. Though they are equally just as lost, the young lovers Veronique and Louis are separated from the couple Florence and Julien by miles of pavement. However, Veronique and Louis are able to suffer together, while Florence and Julien are not. They are both in the center of Paris—but frustrated Julien is stuck in a fancy office building, while disheartened Florence wanders the Champs-Élysées. They both do not know where the other is, even though they are close; they are divided only by vertical structures, as opposed to horizontal planes. However, even before they are separated by Julien’s detainment, Paris separates them; in fact, they are never in a scene together. The film opens on a phone conversation between the lovers, and there are numerous crosscuts between close-up shots of their faces as they clutch the phone receivers and murmur adorations to one another. The intrusiveness of this shot removes the concept of “setting,” so the lovers aren’t positioned in the physical city of Paris so much as in their own, un-geographical, all-consuming world. However, when they hang up, the camera pulls back, and captures Julien setting down the receiver on a desk while zooming out to reveal that he has been standing in a high office in a building in the financial center of Paris. Only after their phone conversation ends, do the burdens of physical spaces (as opposed to emotional ones)—namely the realistic city of Paris—become relevant to the characters, and the story. This crosscutting technique, featuring shots of the lovers from different angles, also creates the illusion that they are looking at one another, or are at least near one another, when they are, in fact, vastly separated by the same Parisian structures that will divide them when they are detached from one another. However, when they are truly separated, they are still united by similar editing—scenes of Julien’s escape attempts from the elevator are often followed by shots of the miserable Florence, dolefully wandering around the streets of Paris; they are united with one another in and out of contact. In addition, though Florence has the ability to walk wherever she wants, she is just as trapped as Julien, who cannot extricate himself from his metal prison. She does not know what to do or where to go, as she does not know where her lover is or what has happened to her husband, so the wide streets of the Rue des Champs-Élysées serve as a contrast to her worried and despondent psyche. Though she is mobile, and he is not, they are equally held captive by Paris for what they have conspired to do. They are further cornered by the city when their ability to see structures diminishes. As Florence walks through Paris, night begins to fall, and soon, she is barely lit among the shadows. The severe use of chiaroscuro by cinematographer Henri Decaë turns her into a ghostly figure, almost glowing and gliding. Similarly, Julien, stuck in a metal box after hours in an office building, is shrouded in darkness as well, and uses a lit cigarette lighter to provide a little illumination. This same chiaroscuro unites them in darkness, but also melts the barriers presented by Paris and presents a tragic, romantic view of their relationship—they are two halves (quite literally, because their dark clothing and the scant lighting only illuminates half their bodies) searching space for completion in one another. Here, the lighting not only gets darker, but the camera also captures more close-ups of her troubled face, and she begins to walk into buildings (such as a café, and the police station); the highly characteristic Paris begins to disappear from behind her, and soon, she is merely a miserable figure wandering in a city. Similarly, in the dark of his elevator, it is impossible to tell that Julien is in Paris, or, rather, that he is anywhere near Florence. Therefore, although Paris is an impenetrable urban obstacle course for the lovers during the day, it is an unrecognizable purgatory by night. Malle stresses Paris as a presiding force that spatially manipulates transgressors and traps them for their crimes until their actions are brought to light. He uses the genre’s preoccupation with solitary location to illuminate the pessimistic themes of the fruitlessness of mobility to better states, and the destruction caused by those who dare to challenge the order of life, blowing up and scaling down Paris to show the chain reaction of cruelty brought on by human selfishness, explaining that any amount of freedom within a physical space does not represent freedom from a physical space. Anyway, I think about this as I walk home from the Eiffel Tower, as it glitters behind me in the dark. View the full article -
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Exploring Diverse Representation of Women in Historical Mysteries
It’s no secret I love historical mysteries. I spent my childhood reading Nancy Drew, The Famous Five and Secret Seven, progressing to Agatha Christie in my teenage and adult years. I rejoiced when the genre moved away from bumbling women who solved mysteries purely by luck to strong, interesting and diverse characters solving crimes through pluck, grit and intelligence in a variety of settings, with a motley crew of supporting characters. In the real world during these time periods, women would have been confined to strictly domestic roles, but in the realm of historical fiction, they emerge as powerful figures, breaking free from patriarchal constraints and asserting their agency in male-dominated spaces. While the upper class and titled gentry still reign supreme (pun intended) within the historical mystery genre, there are plenty of unique and interesting settings and characters to keep the most mystery addicted reader engaged. In my new release, The Mayfair Dagger, Albertine is unusual in that she was raised by a scientifically minded father who prided himself on educating Albertine and her brother as equals, however upon his death, due to the inheritance laws of the time, she finds her utterly untrustworthy cousin named as her ‘guardian’. So, she does what any self respecting woman would do – she steals a dogcart and travels to London with her friend-cum-maid and sets herself up as a lady detective hoping to earn her own money, and gaining control over her life, with hilarious results (none of them money making results, much to her chagrin). Female detectives in historical mysteries highlight the resilience, intelligence, and resourcefulness of women in the face of adversity. These strong and unique women serve as inspiring role models for readers, as they often fight against wider social injustices and help shape readers’ understanding of historical events and women’s roles throughout history, as well as supporting readers to develop empathy and understanding for people from different backgrounds. Take Sherry Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series – Charlotte Holmes ruins herself (scandalous!) to remove herself from the oppressive upper class society she lives in. Pretending to be a man ensures she can earn money as a detective and is able to dedicate herself to solving the most puzzling of crimes. The greatest riddle for her though, is emotion. Described by Thomas as “on the very high-functioning end of the autism spectrum” we have front row seats to Charlotte’s internal dialogue as she struggles to understand her friends and family, and show love in a manner that is understood and received by the ‘Neurotypicals’ in her life. And who isn’t a sucker for the ol’ dressed as a man going adventuring trope?! Laura Joh Rowland’s Victorian Mystery series, beginning with The Ripper’s Shadow, is another outstanding example. Set in Victorian England, this series follows Sarah Bain, a photographer of risqué images of, ahem, ladies of the night, she hunts for Jack the Ripper with a diverse bunch of friends including a street urchin, a gay aristocrat, a Jewish butcher and his wife. Where does one find friends like this, one asks oneself? I’d sign up immediately! The Harlem Renaissance Mystery Series by Nekesa Afia follows Louise Lloyd, a Black journalist in the 1920s Harlem, as she becomes embroiled in murder investigations while navigating the vibrant cultural scene of the Harlem Renaissance. Think shimmery gowns, dancing, bootleg alcohol and a serial killer hunting young girls…ok, ok, you got me. Nekesa Afia’s own promotional copy beats anything I could write: “if you want a jazz age murder mystery starring a tiny, tired lesbian, look no further than DEAD DEAD GIRLS.” The recently published The Mayor of Maxwell Street by Avery Cunningham is a delicious addition to the historical mystery genre. Wealthy (albeit newly minted, but one can’t have it all) debutante Nelly Sawyer works secretly undercover as an investigative journalist, who becomes embroiled in a hunt for, you guessed it, the missing mayor. Cunningham does a magnificent job at placing us in 1920’s Prohibition-era Chicago, and the cast of characters include a speakeasy manager, not one but two love interests for Nelly and ALL the fashion. Sujata Massey writes historical mysteries set in Asia, with her most recent – The Mistress of Bhatia House – gives us India in 1922. Featuring an amateur detective in the form of Bombay’s only female solicitor, Perveen Mistry, grapples with class divisions, sexism, and complex family dynamics. Massey shows beautifully what a complicated country India was at that time, colonised by the British as it was and does an excellent job of defining the social issues in an entertaining and intriguing way. These characters, among many others, represent the diverse and dynamic portrayal of women in historical mysteries, where strong, dynamic protagonists challenge convention and shape the genre. From Victorian England to 1920s Harlem and beyond, these characters defy societal norms, navigate complex social landscapes, and pursue justice with unwavering determination. Through their stories, readers gain insight into the resilience, intelligence, and resourcefulness of women throughout history, while also confronting important social issues and expanding their understanding of the world. As we immerse ourselves in the rich tapestry of historical mysteries, we celebrate the diversity of women’s experiences and the enduring legacy of their courage and strength. Now, pour me a gin darling, I’ve got some books to read! *** View the full article
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