On apologies

JAN: I guess I've never really understood apologies before. I was under the misguided notion that when you wanted an apology from someone, you wanted it to be sincere. From the heart. As if the person felt that he or she did you wrong and was truly sorry about it.

I never got the whole "apology" as marketing thing. But now I see the apology is an incredibly useful tool. For example, if your name is fading from the headlines, say like Jaimee Grubbs, one of Tiger Wood's mistresses, all you do is demand an apology. Not a real one that he may mean. But one he might be forced to make for public relations reasons.

Jaimee wants Tiger Woods to apologize to her because he made her feel like she was "the only girl." We won't go into Jaimee's cognitive skills, we'll stick to her marketing skills. Bravo, Jaimee!

You can also use the apology to keep you in the papers by doing really stupid things and apologizing for them John Mayer may or may not have done this deliberately when he dissed his old girlfriends, Jessica SImpson and Jennifer Aniston, in Playboy Magazine.

But you must ask: did he think the Playboy reporter wasn't taking notes when he was talking?? After all this time in the celebrity limelight, did he not notice that reporters glom onto the first hint of controversy??

We all make mistakes. It's just that we all don't get huge amounts of press for them. So I've been putting on my thinking cap, trying to come up with an idea: I could either confess to having an affair with someone famous and then apologize afterward (sorry, I was delusional) Or better yet, maybe I could plagiarize a Pulitizer-prize winning author, and apologize afterward. (sorry, I just didn't notice i was copying word for word.)

Okay, so what are YOUR thoughts on apologies. And do you have any inventive ideas on how

to get press for them??

HANK: I think it's the "Just spell my name right" syndrome. If they're using your name, that's good, no matter what. And there's nothing like demanding something to get a story about how you're demanding it. I'm still shaking my head over the Rielle Hunter sex tape.

Okay, so first you get a camera and tape yourself having sex with your illicit adulterer politico lover. Right there, no way. Then someone else somehow has the tape? Are you kidding me? Let me ju

st say this--*I'm* demanding an apology from everyone involv

ed in that debacle. I used up valuable brain room on it, and someone ought to pay.

JAN: Yes, that one has had me amazed, too. Let's see, you're a politician running for NATIONAL office, and all your enemies are looking for ways to bring you down -- so you video tape your adulterous affair. Then you lose track of it? And with that stellar sense of judgment, you want to make policy for the rest of us?

HALLIE: Apologies are oh so useful... especially when someone is screaming at you. I once apologized to a guy who rear-ended me in traffic. Shut him right up.

Did you know that you have a better chance of getting your message across if you speak in someone's RIGHT ear. That's according to a study in the UK reported in The Telegraph. But those folks drive on the wrong side or the road so maybe American left ears are more receptive? We could duplicate their experiment. We'd need to work 30 young men up into a fury. I'll drive.

RHYS: What sickens me is that the apology seems to be enough. Some sleazy public figure stands tearfully at the mike and sobs "I have sinned" and then everything is supposed to be all right again.

It seems that so many people relish fame and the spotlight so much that they'd rather be pitied or despised than back out of the public eye. On the other hand the sincere apology is one of the hardest things to do, and one of the most healing.

RO: Ditto, ditto and ditto. The guy who spends a lifetime saying that gays are going to hell, and shouldn't be teachers and shouldn't be in the military..then deals with the inevitable sex tape of him with his massage therapist, by saying "Ooops. I'm sorry. I have sinned"? That makes me want to scream. The guys who are unfaithful? I don't care, that's between them and their wives. I fail to see why anyone cares. Maybe if it were Russell Crowe and Michelle Obama I'd be mildly interested, otherwise - so what?

Saying you're sorry is a great way to get the other person to shut up. Unless you're my husband, in which case it will only unleash another stream of "I don't want you to be sorry, I want you to know why -fill in the blank - bothers me."

I think we should take out an ad in an upcoming show program announcing that the writers of Jungle Red are profoundly sorry for their actions and words appearing on www.jungleredwriters.com. We understand that a number of people were shocked, appalled, and horrified while bemused, engaged and entertained by our words and although we understand and are deeply concerned we believe it is our dut

y, nay, our sacred trust with the blogosphere to continue to write as we have for the past four years without regard to ratings, hits, tweets or the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune because we are six brave women who will stand together to fight this thing and emerge victorious in the name of women everywhere.

Maybe people will wonder what the $%*& we're apologizing for.

HANK: Oh, definitely! All kinds of new people would come read our blog to see what they missed! Uh, once, maybe.

ROBERTA: Ro, you have the same evil mind that I do. let's apologize! Maybe we should start saying s

ome things that are worth apologizing for! What perplexes me more than the fake apologies are the folks who DON'T apologize, when "I'm sorry" might make a huge difference in the outcome of their mess. But I think part of it has to do with Rhys's point, an apology is not easy, especially done with humbl

eness and sincerity.

JAN: Ro, I think that's a brilliant idea!! And next, we can all apologize for sleeping with Tiger Woods!

Come back tomorrow, when I reveal why not doing something you want to do is oddly appealing.

On Surprise

"Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain." Carl Jung

ROBERTA: I hope you all will indulge me today as my new book is out and I can't help wanting to talk writing actually how our writing can surprise us. When I began writing Deadly Advice, I needed a sidekick for Rebecca Butterman; for reasons unknown, I chose a sandplay therapist. As sometimes happens, that character moved forward to take a leading role in the new mystery, ASKING FOR MURDER. Since I was basically ignorant about sandplay therapy, I ordered a book on the subject and began to struggle through it. Le crap, I said to myself before long. You know nothing about this and one book isn't going to answer your questions.

So I Googled sandplay therapists and found one in New Hampshire who was very interested in helping me portray this kind of treatment accurately. She spent several hours on the phone walking me through what her office looked like, how a session would be conducted, and then how the therapist would help the patient understand the arrangement she'd made in the sand tray. And then I wrote the book. This summer, months after the book was in production, I went to visit this therapist. WOW! Her walls were lined with shelves carrying thousands of figurines. I desperately wanted to study them, choose the ones that called to me and place them in the sand, and then have Sally help me understand what I'd done. Oddly enough, Rebecca had already done this in the book! What I mean is, I'd written the scene and now I was living it as my character had.

So that's the question for today, Jungle Red Writers, what's the most interesting surprise you've come across lately in your writing or your reading?

RO: That's a timely question for me since I just had a lengthy meeting at my publishers and have been talking about my second book a lot. I thought I was writing a fun and frisky book about a missing woman, some fake native Americans, and Ukrainian mobsters with a few health-conscious bikers thrown in, and what I really did was write a book about three female friends. It seems I've done both, quite unintentionally.

On the reading side, recently I was surprised by the ending of the latest Lee Child, Nothing To Lose. It was more overtly political than I expected it to be.
Not that I minded, or was shocked by his position..just surprised.

JAN: In the life-imitating art category: When I researched A Confidential Source, I needed help on how criminal law worked in Rhode Island. I got it from a lawyer named Patrick Lynch. When I created a prosecutor love interest for Hallie Ahern, my protagonist, I carefully steered away from any "P" names.

After much deliberation, I chose Matt as the perfect name for Hallie's boyfriend, and made him ambitious to become the head of the Criminal Division. Then, my source, Patrick Lynch ran for Attorney General -- and won. When I began researching Yesterday's Fatal, I didn't want to take up the AG's valuable time asking my tedious fiction questions, so I asked him if he could introduce me to a willing prosecutor who worked for him.

Well, as it turned out, the prosecutor's name was Matt. We had a few lunches, and he was so incredibly helpful, he became essential to my storytelling. Not only that, he was soon promoted to chief of the Criminal Division.

I had to warn real Matt that everybody in Rhode Island would mistake him for fictional Matt -- especially after I mentioned him in the acknowledgements. But he was a really good sport about it.

HALLIE: Of late I’ve been reading about con men. In the news, Clark Rockefeller with his string of aliases and missing former landlords. Two books just out about Han Van Meegeren, a successful painter who got back at art critics by forging Vermeers. A riveting New Yorker article about of Frederic Bourdin who repeatedly passed himself off as a homeless teenager, inventing scores of identities in more than fifteen countries and five languages. He goes too far when he tries to pass himself off as a family’s son who disappeared years earlier and stumbles into what may have been a murder. Shades of Josephine Tey’s wonderful “Brat Ferrar.”

Art imitating life or the other way around? You couldn’t make up more fascinating characters.

HANK: I so agree, Hallie. The "Clark Rockfeller" story is incredible. I just met someone who had talked with him at length--she said he was charming,well-spoken.But for some reason, when she went home, she looked up some stuff he had said about his education. It was all a lie.

What surprised me? I'm so sorry to bring it up, and I know it's old news, but I'm still not over John Edwards. How pitiful, of course. But here he was, running for president. What if he had won the nomination? He risked--pulling the entire election out from under the Democrats. He had to decide--which was more important, the future of the country? Or what he wanted to do. And he decided: what he wanted was more important.

The "Most self-centered person on the planet" award gets retired, don't you think? Awarded to him forever for lifetime achievement in selfishness?
It still surprises me.

ROBERTA: Ro, we can't wait to read that book! And Jan, has Matt gotten comments about his new fictional self? I'm still astonished about John Edwards too--maybe he was imitating some art and we just don't know about it yet. I'm never surprised when people do dumb things--we have so many layers and we wander through them half-aware. But it is astonishing that someone in a position that high could convince himself none of it would come out. Maybe he could have used a few sessions with my friend Sally, the sandplay therapist, and saved himself a lot of embarrassment and his family a lot of pain.