The Diversity Paradox

by Janis Patterson

Can I make a confession? I love Thanksgiving - the family, the excitement of the beginning of the holiday season, the Americanism of the day, and yes, of course the food - but I hate turkey. Oh, I know people rave about it, how good it is and how good for you it is, and some people (including The Husband) eat it all year around. I just don’t like it. Badly cooked it tastes like fibrous cardboard. Even when well cooked it tastes like a slightly off chicken. But that doesn’t change the fact I love Thanksgiving - I just don’t eat the turkey.

Which is a rather clumsy way of saying that there is room for all opinions in this great big world, even in publishing as in food. There is something for everyone. Don’t like science fiction? Don’t read it. Don’t like romance? Same. Don’t like an alternative history mystery suspense set on Alpha Centauri with a cast of half-humanoids/half-reptiles? Don’t pick it up. 

Every permutation of genre has someone who wants to read it. That’s one of the glories of self-publishing - as a writer you can hit that special niche, no matter how small or restricted it is. The big commercial publishers, bound by the sheer economics of distribution and print runs and storage, can’t. They have to hit the broadest audiences possible in order to make a profit - which, unfortunately, is the bottom line for corporations. 

However - there is a disturbing sub-current swelling through the writing world. Instead of allowing the writer to create the story he wants, there are those urging that stories must glorify and showcase ‘diversity’ no matter if it suits the writer’s vision of his story or not. (Don’t get me wrong - I am in favor of diversity; it is a good thing, but only when it happens naturally and organically instead of being forced down writers/readers throats as a mandate.)

Neither do readers escape this dictate; they are very strongly urged to spend money which they might not have to buy books they might not be interested in and use time they might not have to read books by people they’ve never heard of - all in homage to the god of diversity. Reading is many things to all people, but in my opinion non-scholarly reading is for most an escape, a time of fantasy where I can go to a place untainted by the myriad complexities of the modern world. And I don’t think that’s wrong.

A nationally-known writing organization recently turned itself inside out and lost a number of members in the process for just this reason. Yes, there were things about the organization that could have been better, but the resolution could have been done better as well. One does not use a Howitzer to kill a mosquito, or level a building to fix a plumbing leak. Overkill is neither good nor practical. That, however, is just my opinion. Yours may differ.

So - as there are differences of opinion and style in the real world, so should there also be in the world of reading and writing. And, dare I add, in the gastronomical world. I wish everyone here the happiest and most enjoyable of Thanksgivings. Appreciate your families and delight in the traditional orgy of eating. May you even enjoy turkey if you like it - just don’t expect me to have any.

The Problems of Living With A Goddess

by Janis Patterson

I was born a Leo, so it naturally follows that I love cats and have had at least one for most of my adult life. My mother, of course, disliked any kind of indoor animal, which accounted for a lot of our conflicts.

Of all the cats I have had, Sakhmet was the most memorable. Some backstory – sometimes back in the 1940s someone had dumped a pair of Siamese cats out in the country behind my grandparents’ barn. They had stayed and interbred until over the generations a recessive gene had become dominant, resulting in a tribe of pure-black Siamese.

I had just moved into my own place and was determined to have a cat, so – with a little cunning, a lot of luck and a great deal of smelly cat food – I captured a tiny little black kitten. I didn’t know what I was getting. Born feral, she never really domesticated. We lived in an uneasy truce for the next 20 years. I named her Sakhmet after the unpredictable lion-headed Egyptian goddess, and the name fit her to a T. Sakhmet could easily have been the last living saber-tooth!

Her vet, who both respected and feared her, said that she had all the Siamese traits – small feet, a heart-shaped face, a voice that sounded like a baby being skinned – but she was completely black (and never got a gray hair!) with enormous eyes that went from green (happy) to gold (better leave until she calms down).

Sakhmet hated people. I was tolerated because I was the bringer of food, but whenever visitors came to my apartment she vanished. People I had known for years swore up and down I didn’t have a cat, that I merely went outside, gathered tufts of hair from the bushes and rubbed them on the carpet so that people would think I had a cat!

Sakhmet was also the most intelligent creature (including some of the two-legged ones I dated) I’ve ever seen. She could turn lights on and off, loved to answer the telephone and could open any door in the place. I had to keep the front and back outside doors key-deadbolted just to be sure.

This was during the heyday of the dinner theatre, when you could have a buffet dinner and then see a play with some of the older luminaries of Hollywood. I was an actress then and was delighted to be cast in UNDER PAPA’S PICTURE, a piece of froth starring the late great Eve Arden. There are several blogs worth of stories from that play’s six-week run, but I’m going to tell only one.

It’s a well known fact that Miss Arden was a great animal lover, and as we had to spend a fair amount of time in the green room waiting for our cues, we would regale each other with tales of our furbabies. She became entranced with some of Sakhmet’s adventures, but I never dreamed where it would lead.

The play ran over the Christmas holidays, so I decided I would have a great big party for the cast and crew. The party was a success, until someone asked where Miss Arden was. Well, I had seen her and her husband Brooks West arrive, and he was in the living room talking to someone, but there was no sign of Miss Arden.

I went looking. It was not that big a place, so I soon found her, and my heart almost stopped. She was in my bedroom, lying flat on the floor and scrunched about three-quarters of the way under my bed, cooing to Sakhmet, who was doubtless as far into the corner as she could get.

I thought I might die. Not only was Eve Arden (Our Miss Brooks!) under my bed, she was under there not only with a half-wild cat who hated everyone but  a generous herd of killer dustbunnies as well!

It all worked out all right. She just got one clawing from Sakhmet, and it only took a minute or two to detach most of the dustbunnies. For the rest of the play she talked again and again about meeting the legendary Sakhmet. She never mentioned the dustbunnies. Thank goodness.

Once when I had to take a trip I frankly blackmailed a police officer friend of mine into taking care of her at his house. He was a patrolman, over 6 ft tall and very fit, but he was no match for Sakhmet. I came home to find her back in my apartment, with a shredded pillowcase and a tray of food and water just barely beyond the swing of the front door. She had lasted exactly two days at his place before terrorizing his family so much that he gave in and brought her back. For the remaining three weeks of my trip he drove almost ten miles each way every day to feed and water her.

One Thanksgiving I came home to stay the holiday with my widowed mother. I brought Sakhmet because the weather was deteriorating and I wasn’t sure I would be able to get home again to feed her. The three of us ended up being snowed in for a number of days. Before it was over the war between Mother and Sakhmet made me think seriously of simply abandoning the two of them and hiking back to my apartment through the snow. It was only four miles…

Sakhmet always liked to lie on shiny, slick fabric. In the den Mother had two antique chairs that were covered in a glorious satin. Sakhmet loved them. Mother was afraid she would have an ‘accident’ on them. Mother covered the chairs with towels, but the next morning the towels had been scraped off onto the floor and Sakhmet was spread in luxurious abandon over the satin. The next night Mother tried pillows. The next morning they were on the floor. The next night Mother gave up and moved both chairs into the living room and shut the door.

The den was carpeted in a beige shag (this was a number of years ago) and there were definite impressions of each chair’s four legs. In the morning – as neatly as if it had been plotted with a ruler – in the middle of each chair’s impressions was a small, brown gift. Mother said she had been right, that Sakhmet had had an accident. I said no, that was no accident, it was a deliberate! The next day the snow melted – thank you, God! – and Sakhmet and I went home.

Though she was sometimes difficult and often downright weird, Sakhmet was also a loving companion. She would lie on my desk while I wrote and slept every night in the small of my back. She was a big part of my life.

Sakhmet lived for 21 years. Toward the end she was very frail and ill, and I was so selfish I could not bring myself to do the right thing and have her put to sleep. She took the decision out of my hands. I had to be out of town, so Mother – unwilling to have Sakhmet in her home again, though this was many years later – drove the 4 miles to my apartment every day to feed her. Sakhmet waited until I was out of town to die. Mother buried her in the most beautiful part of her back garden and put flowers in her grave.

I’ll never forget the feeling of coming home to that empty, empty apartment. I’ve had many other cats since Sakhmet’s passing, but none have equaled her in intelligence or personality. Or temperament. Unfortunately, all my pictures of her perished in the disaster of a flood caused by a burst pipe, so all I have of her is memories. Sleep well, my dear old friend. I still miss you.

And Real Life Returns

by Janis Patterson

If you’re like me, this past month or two has been a fairly dizzying round of parties and dinner parties and cooking and quick meals snatched while shopping and wrapping. Calories have been whizzing around (and sticking more than we would like, darn it) like mosquitoes on a hot, humid day.

Well, it’s all over, and I say thank goodness! Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are over, the parties are finished and we are stuffed to surfeit. All that lies ahead of us in the near future is Valentine’s Day, which is usually awash with chocolate and, if you’re lucky, a nice dinner out.

Real life is back. Now we clean up the drifts of tissue paper and wrapping paper scraps, put away the holiday china for another year, take down the tree and pack away the ornaments. If you had a real tree, you have the joy of vacuuming up the dried needles that seem to be able to hide in your carpet until July.

Oh, and work. I’ll admit my work tends to suffer during this intense holiday season. It’s hard to sit at the computer making up tales and trying to get all my clues in line when a big chunk of my mind is trying to remember how far along I am on gift buying and worrying if we’ve forgotten someone and trying to decide on what dish to take to the family potluck on Christmas Day and… well, you know. So I pretty much quit writing. It is, I delude myself, better not to spend the time screwing up my story with a bunch of stuff that will probably have to be pulled out later in favor of something more rational.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!

But now the holiday season is over. New Year’s is never a big deal in our house. We don’t like to go out and celebrate on that night – too many irresponsible revelers out after drinking too much making the streets dangerous. Like last year, like almost every year, we went to eat Mexican food at our favorite neighborhood café in the early evening, then went home and watched television while we split a bottle of champagne at midnight - or earlier. The quiet times with The Husband are the best.

As the cold days of winter set in, though, and the holidays are just a memory, it is time to concentrate on work again. I have two standalones to finish and several completed books to get into the publishing pipeline. The most exciting thing, however, is I have a new series to write. I personally dislike series, or at least most of the series I have read. Just how many times can an amateur sleuth fall over a dead body in a small town, after all? Plus, I’m very tired of the current trend of cutesy and relentlessly perky amateur sleuths (female) who obsess over shoes, who either cook or do some sort of craft, who brainlessly charge into danger and who always manage to avoid being arrested for impeding a police investigation.

My sleuth is Dr. Rachel Petrie (no relation to the famed Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, a fact that is a running gag) a contract archaeologist who works all over the world, giving her a chance to stumble over a body in a different place each time. Hey, if she didn’t find a body it wouldn’t be a mystery series, would it? There does have to be a certain amount of suspension of disbelief.

Currently I’m working on the first book, A KILLING AT TARA TWO, which is set in Alabama on a dig excavating a plantation house burned during the War of Northern Aggression. It’s great fun.

Now I must get to work writing on it. I hope all of you had a very happy holiday season, and wish you a happy and prosperous New Year.

Guest Mary Black with A Thanksgiving Mystery

A fellow prehistory fiction writer has put together a mystery for us. Not a prehistory mystery, but an intriguing one. Please help me welcome Mary Black to the blog. For info on her awesome fiction, please see below.

The Thanksgiving Mystery

Mary S. Black

My family used to spend Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house out in the cotton fields near Lubbock, Texas, when I was a child.  It was a six or eight-hour drive for my mother, with three kids packed in the back seat.  The night before she would always make fried chicken and butter and lettuce sandwiches on soft white bread for our lunch.  We loved those lunches! 

We knew we were almost there when we passed the Four Sixes Ranch.  Sometimes we would even see a real cowboy riding a horse.  The closer we got to my grandmother’s, the more newly-plucked cotton fields we would see, with white cotton blowing along the road like snowdrifts. Hundreds (or maybe tens) of cotton trailers would be parked around the old metal gins, waiting their turn to be processed.

When we arrived, we jumped out and squealed to meet our cousins, our favorite people in the world.  Soon my older cousin and I would be playing paper dolls or trying on our grandmother’s jewelry, a wonderful secret thing we loved to do. The grown-ups gathered in the kitchen for coffee and were soon down to serious conversation about farm production and politics.

On Thanksgiving Day I loved to set the table. Beautiful china on a worn, white damask cloth. I thought I was chosen especially for this task because I was so responsible. It made me feel grown-up.  Meanwhile my little brother and our boy cousin were running through the house shooting plastic guns at each other, having a great time re-enacting their favorite TV shows.

If there was enough room, we kids could sit at the big table, but otherwise, we had our own table off to the side.  That’s what usually happened. We always had turkey and plenty of giblet gravy, cornbread dressing, home-grown green beans, and pumpkin pie with Cool Whip. And Mrs. Baird’s store-bought white rolls. Delicious!  But the best part came at night, hours after the big mid-day meal.  That’s when we would wander into the kitchen one by one, and make ourselves great turkey sandwiches, complete with dressing and cranberry sauce.  And gravy, lots of gravy.  Yum! Those sandwiches seemed somehow luxurious to me. All was well as the elders played dominoes and we kids enjoyed our own luscious diversions.

Until the middle of the night. That’s when the puking would start, usually with the kids.  Often two or three of us were throwing up all night and into the next day.  I remember lying on the sofa, feeling helpless, while my grandmother urged me to drink some Seven-Up.  I had just thrown up and I didn’t want anything in my stomach ever again. But I would drink it at her urging, and then barf again just to prove I was right.  This “food poisoning,” as my grandmother called it happened year after year. 

Why were the kids always sick at Thanksgiving? Well, they caught something at school, one grown-up would say. Or she’s run-down said another. Too much candy someone would always add.  Just “food poisoning” my grandmother would say. 

There were two kinds of poisoning when I was growing up: food poisoning and blood poisoning. I never have figured out what blood poisoning is.  But about thirty years later it hit me that food poisoning was what we call today “food-borne illness,” caused by a number of different bacteria.   

 It was those wonderful evening sandwiches we’d made. Where did we find all that food when we went into the kitchen at night?  Sitting on top of the stove of course.  There wasn’t room in the refrigerator for all those left-overs, and I’m not sure High Plains women of my grandmother’s generation would have even thought to refrigerate cooked food anyway.

So all that turkey and home-made gravy sat on the stove, reaching the perfect temperature for the nasty bacteria Clostirdium perfringens to flourish.  And flourish it did, right in our digestive tracts.  It’s commonly found in meat and gravies that haven’t been kept hot enough after cooking, or left out too long. Symptoms usually appear with 8-16 hours.  Yep, that was us! 

May you all have a wonderful—and food safe—Thanksgiving holiday!

***Mary has taken an area in Texas and made it her own. She fell in love with the Lower Pecos more than twenty years ago. Since then she has studied the archaeology and related ethnography of the area with numerous scholars. She has an Ed.D. from Harvard University in Human Development and Psychology and lives in Austin with her husband, and archaeologist, and two cats.

Please check out her fiction at http://marysblack.com/! 

Viewpoint, Tinsel and Magic

by Janis Patterson

I am ambivalent about the holidays.

I still have enough of the child in me to be in joyous awe of Thanksgiving, with its focus on thanking God for what made this country great as well as (let’s face it) for the unrestrained gluttony. My family is full of excellent cooks who, for this one day a year, throw their usually healthful menus to the winds and provide a sumptuous feast. Some of the more fanciful and calorie-laden recipes are only brought out on Thanksgiving … and occasionally on Christmas, but not always. We all eat all day and no one says a thing except, “More, please.” We all believe that one day of gourmandry is nothing to worry about, at least, not if you have a ready supply of Tums and Pepto Bismol handy.

The fortnight before Christmas is the same emotional rush – the decorations, the carols, the lights, the mysterious and alluring packages that one by one appear under the tree as if really brought by elves… It is the stuff of magic, and if you are not touched by it I pity you.

On the other hand, I am adult, and I know the work and expenditure and planning and sometimes sacrifice that must be done to create the magic of both holidays – the hard, grunt work that makes them happen. Grunt work it might be, but isn’t all magic supported by grunt work? It’s the quintessential symbiotic relationship… for adults, at least.

Which is a lot like writing. (Stay with me here – I do have a point.) As adults we can see both sides of the holidays – the magic and the hard work. As writers, we have to see and make believable both sides of our characters, bad and good. We have to see all of their motivations, even – especially! – if they conflict with other characters. Such a skill is a necessity, unless we are content to write flat cardboard people with no depth, no reality – creatures who are nothing more than verbal paper dolls. Real people and real characters are multi-dimensional, with sometimes contradictory beliefs and actions both towards others and within their own psyches. As writers we have to see and respond to both.

In other words, we have to create both meat and tinsel in our books. Yes, it’s hard work, but when it’s done right there is magic – and that magic is what we all want.

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving, and wish you a Merry Christmas or whatever holiday you observe. Now I must run – Christmas is coming more quickly than we can believe, and I’m running low on tinsel!

Thanks

Since Thanksgiving is coming up, I’d like to give out some thanks today. What I’m thankful for:

my health

my family

my buddies here at Make Mine Murder

all my other writing colleagues

our new home in Knoxville and being closer to some of the family (although farther from some,   

also)

being born in America (not a perfect country, but so much better than many others)

being able to do exactly what I want to do every day--write fiction

turkey (I love turkey)

Seasonal Reading by Christine Duncan

Other than taking a trip down Target's seasonal aisle and pushing all the "try me" buttons on their plastic skeletons that scream or their cackling witches, (and then going over one more aisle and checking out the Christmas decorations) there is nothing I like better than to read a good book about Halloween--or Christmas--or Fourth of July for that matter.

I've liked to read seasonal mysteries ever since I was a kid. As a matter of fact, I like it so much, I set my latest mystery, Safe House, at Thanksgiving time. But while it may be easy finding Halloween books to read to your little ones this time of year, it can be more difficult finding an adult mystery novel set then. I rely on sites like Myshelf with their special holiday lists or review sites like the GenreReview to find the books I need to get me in the mood for the seasons.


So if you're having trouble getting in the Halloween spirit right now, I can recommend Lesley Meier's Trick or Treat Murders. It's a cozy and Lucy Stone and her family feel like friendly neighbors that I like to visit, every time I read one of the series. Or maybe try an oldie but goodie, Barbara Michael's Prince of Darkness. I'll be scanning the lists myself for something new. So by all means, if you have a favorite seasonal mystery, tell me about it. I need something to get me in the mood--besides all this chocolate I'm buying for the Trick or Treaters.

Oh, and just a reminder, October is Domestic Violence awareness month. Pass the word--and if you have a bit to spare, send some money to your local shelter.

Thanksgiving--Mysteries

I've been spending the week, like most other wives and mothers here in the States thinking about Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, as Andy Rooney recently reminded us all on Sixty Minutes, is in danger of being swallowed up by the commercialization of Christmas. That would be a shame because what other day takes us back to Norman Rockwell's America, where we get to fight with our siblings (of whatever age) over who gets the wishbone, look at old family photos, and remember Grandmom and Granddad, God rest their souls? What other day are you expected to eat until you can't anymore and then do nothing else except, of course, the dishes? What other day is set aside for us to appreciate all that we have? Despite the current economic downturn, I know that I have a lot. And since this post will be published Thursday, and since I like the holiday so much I set my second book, Safe House at Thanksgiving, I thought I'd ask you about Thanksgiving mysteries.

I am one of those readers who likes to read books to put me in the mood. If I am going back East, I might read a book set there. If it's the holidays, I try to read something set at that time of year. Thank God for Myshelf.com They've figured out that there are folks like me, and they have lists of books for each holiday. A quick survey of their Thanksgiving mystery list produced a couple that I've read and enjoyed. If you haven't read, Margaret Maron's Up Jumps the Devil, I highly recommend it and anything else that woman has written. I also enjoyed Jeanne M Dams' Sins Out of School, and Leslie Meier's Turkey Day Murders.

I'd love to hear some recommendations from you. So before you go out for those Black Friday sales, (another holiday tradition I thoroughly approve of) sit down with a cup of coffee and tell us all your favorite holiday mysteries.