Karin Salvalaggio--Waiting for Buses

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Where do writers get their ideas? 

This is the questions readers most often ask (and I am endlessly fascinated by the answers, because they are always different.) 

The second is, "How exactly do you get those ideas?" (Meaning is there some magical process by which those ideas are delivered.) 

Well, my friend Karin Salvalaggio (and her friends) are here to tell exactly how those ideas come about.  And Karin should know--here's what the Richmond Times-Dispatch has to say about her fourth Macy Greely novel, SILENT RAIN:  

"Salvalaggio, whose trademarks include intricate plotting and stark but affecting prose, scores another triumph."—Richmond Times-Dispatch

SILENT RAIN has been all the buzz on the crime writing scene the last few weeks, and with good reason. It's fabulous!

Karin, I might add, is my polar opposite. I live in Texas and write books set in London. Karin lives in London and writes books set in Montana. But we both have to come up with a method for getting those words down on paper. (She is also my best London research pub crawl pal, and, yes, there is such a thing.) Here's Karin to reveal her secrets!

KARIN SALVALAGGIO:  'Eighty percent of success is showing up’. – Woody Allen

Most people seem impressed when I tell them I’m a published author. I’ve noticed that the words ‘crime novelist’ are an added bonus, but more on that later. It’s rather nice that our profession is still held in such high regard. I therefore believe it’s important to maintain a bit of mystique. When asked where the motivation to continue writing comes from I nod sagely and say silly things like: ‘The ideas come and the next thing I know I’m swept away’ or ‘There is a bit of a struggle until I find that all-important tipping point. After that the book almost writes itself’.

All of this is, of course, a load of bollocks. There is nothing mystical about motivation. Much is down to establishing good habits and setting realistic goals, but sometimes even that fails to get the engine turning over. A writer’s life isn’t glamorous and mornings can be cold. Most days I’m home alone in my dressing gown clutching a bowl of muesli as I sit in front of a laptop. I subscribe to the notion that ideas are like buses––you wait for hours and then three show up at once. You’re not going to get very far if you’re not there to catch them. But it’s not always easy to find the motivation to stay ‘seated’ when your deadline is months away and sunshine is pouring through your office window. Cue the sound of the neighbors having a cheeky early afternoon glass of wine. It’s all I can do not to leap out the window.

Thankfully, there are many ways to jump start the process. I belong to group of writers on Facebook. We occasionally have ‘word races’. Participants publish their word counts at the end of the session. I’m highly competitive so will crank out in excess of 2000 words an hour if focused. Not all of it will be usable. In fact some of it will go straight to the bin, but remember what I said about ideas being like buses. There’s something I forgot to mention. You not only need to be sitting in that seat to catch them you also need a lot of buses.

I asked some of my author friends what they did when they were struggling with motivation.

Claire Fuller admits to having a big problem with motivation, especially with first drafts, whether that's novels or articles. She often has to trick herself – ‘Claire, you only have to read the paragraph you wrote yesterday’. Hopefully reading it will make her start writing. Or she resorts to bribery: ‘when I've written 500 words I'm allowed to stop and have lunch’. Claire’s debut Swimming Lessons is published by Tin House in the US.

Dinah Jefferies experienced a devastating lack of motivation as she wrote her fifth book. ‘It was truly uncomfortable and lasted three months, during which time I sat at my desk and continued to write my first draft. Once it was down, I then had something to play with. Since then the edits are proving really rewarding and I'm glad I stuck with it’. Dinah’s earlier book, The Tea Planter's Wife is published in the US by Crown.

Considering her legendry output it would be wise to listen to Louise Beech’s heartfelt advice. ‘I motivate myself with chocolate digestives. Fantastic for my words - fatal for my figure’. Louise’s second novel is entitled The Mountain in my Shoe.

Kerry Hadley sets aside 90 minutes and just writes. ‘That's it. No phone, no FB, no talking or daydreaming, just door-closed-leave-me-alone-I'm-writing-time ... I don't word count - that's not important. If I fancy doing more, I do, if not, I don't. Apparently, according to Oprah, it takes 7 days to form a habit like this (and 30 days to overcome an addiction.) I've found this to be a much more satisfying way of producing something than, say, a daily word count, or sitting in blank hope for the day.’ Kerry’s novel The Black Country is published by Salt Publishing.

Author Rachael Lucas finds it almost impossible to write without a deadline, so she asks her agent to give her one ("I want four chapters by next month"). ‘First drafts are the worst thing for me. Once I have something to play with, I'm much better.’ (The State of Grace will be published by Feiwel and Friends in the USA in 2018)

Vanessa Lafaye finds editing much easier than writing, so she tricks herself into getting started by thinking that she’ll just read the last thing she wrote. ‘Usually that works, but not always. I like to read the book reviews in The Sunday Times. The reviewers' comments always spur me on, hoping I won't make the same mistakes they criticise in others' work - I'll make different ones!’ Vanessa’s debut At First Light was published by Orion in 2015.

Christine Breen also finds editing much easier. She thinks her training as a copy editor is a double-edged sword. ‘When I'm stumped I turn to some of my favourite women writers like Elizabeth Strout, Alice McDermott, Ann Patchett, Deborah Levy and Anne Tyler and reread passages to jump-start the stalled engine.’ Her Name is Rose was published by St Martin's Press.

Author Kerry Fisher tells herself that it's like having a huge piece of homework hanging over her and that she’ll feel so much happier when she’s done it. She also has a minimum word count of 1000 words a day and forces herself to do them. ‘Sometimes I'll be there on a Friday night at 7pm with the wine waiting downstairs, thinking '73 more words'...I write the expected weekly word count on my calendar, allowing a few days off here and there for impromptu family crises. If I fall behind, I make myself work weekends to catch up. The one thing I cannot face is a deadline panic (teens leaving revision till the last minute puts the family under enough stress without me joining in.)’ Kerry’s novel The Silent Wife is published by Bookouture.

DEBS: I'm so happy to see that I'm not the only one who struggles with that daily word count. I love the Woody Allen quote, and I LOVE the buses. "Waiting for the bus" is my new mantra.

And all very useful advice from Karin's writer friends, although my favorite bit is definitely the chocolate digestives... (Brit-speak for chocolate-covered-sort-of-graham-crackerish cookies. There really is no American equivalent. But they are delicious, and perfect with tea, and very inspiring.)

Here's more about SILENT RAIN--

Grace Adams has spent three years trying to move on—mentally, physically, emotionally—from the traumatizing events of her past. But it’s not easy when the world is morbidly curious about the crimes that shaped her childhood, when despite her changed name, people still track her down for the sensational details. Now in college in Bolton, Montana, the one person Grace has trusted with the truth about her past has betrayed her. The bestselling novelist Peter Granger wants to use Grace’s story in his next book, regardless of how desperate Grace is to keep the details to herself. And then, on Halloween night, Peter Granger’s house burns to the ground and his and his wife’s bodies are found inside.

Montana state detective Macy Greeley is sent to Bolton to handle the investigation into the fire and deaths…which soon appear to be arson and murder. It doesn’t take Macy long to realize that Grace isn’t the only one whom Peter Granger has betrayed, and there are no shortage of others in town who took issue with him and his wife. What at first looked like a straightforward investigation is poised to expose some of Bolton’s darkest secrets, and the fallout may put more than one life in danger.

KARIN SALVALAGGIO received an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck at the University of London. Born in West Virginia and raised in an Air Force family, she grew up on a number of military bases around the United States. She now lives in London with her two children. Silent Rain is her fourth novel.

REDS and readers, what do you do to get motivated?

 

Karin Salvalaggio--Setting the Perfect Place

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  This seems to be our week for talking about place in novels.  I was fortunate last autumn to be given an advance reader's copy of Karin Salvalaggio's debut novel, BONE DUST WHITE, which I think is stunningly good. The book leaves such a strong physical impression that whenever I think about the story I feel a bone-deep cold. Like William Kent Krueger's Minnesota novels, the setting becomes a character in itself.

Someone is knocking at the door to Grace Adams' house, and he won't stop. Grace thinks she knows who it is, but when she goes to her second floor window for a look she sees a woman she doesn't recognize. The woman isn't alone for long before a man emerges from the dark of the surrounding woods, stabs her, and leaves her for dead. Trying to help, Grace goes to the woman and is shocked to find that it's her mother Leanne-a woman who abandoned her 11 years before. There's nothing she can do, and Leanne is already past the point where she can tell Grace what happened all those years ago or why she came back now.

While Grace was only a child when Leanne left her, Detective Macy Greeley has been waiting for Leanne ever since she disappeared from Collier, MT. She's looking to close a case that has been haunting the town for far too long, but Collier is a hard-bitten place where the people are fierce when it comes to keeping their feuds between themselves and keeping secrets hidden in the past. 

Here's what the advance reviews have to say:

“The suspense meter spikes dramatically… This complicated, peel-away-layers debut procedural intoxicates from the opening page and has word-of-mouth selling power... Recommend for fans of Archer Mayor, Gwen Florio, and Craig Johnson. C.J. Box’s The Highway comes to mind, too.” –Library Journal (Debut of the Month)

“Salvalaggio’s debut deftly intertwines a town without a future and citizens without hope, people in need and people who need to be needed, and a new murder that brings closure to four unsolved cases.” –Kirkus

“In Salvalaggio’s haunting debut… the author creates a hardscrabble community of characters that readers won’t soon forget.”  –Publishers Weekly

And I couldn't agree more. Here's Karin to tell us a little bit about why she chose Montana and the fictional town of Collier.

KARIN SALVALAGGIO: Novels are often full of memorable settings, but some of these locations are more remarkable than others because they serve both the narrative and create the desired mood. What would The Shining by Stephen King be without the Overlook Hotel and the grand seclusion of the Rocky Mountains? Daphne du Maurier’s short story “Don’t Look Now” wouldn’t work as well with out those eerie Venetian canals and alleyways as its backdrop. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson Hedeby Island serves as the perfect setting for both a ‘locked room’ mystery and an isolated environment where our intrepid reporter Mikael Blomkvist investigates members of a highly dysfunctional family, one of whom is certainly guilty of murder. A novel’s setting can be real or imaginary. It can be as isolated as a mountainside or in the middle of a teeming metropolis and as exotic as a Caribbean Island or as humble as a housing tract. Whether it’s a location that haunts your reader for a lifetime or inspires them to book a flight, it is important that the author makes a conscious decision regarding their novel’s setting. So much depends on the reader coming away with a lasting impression. The more visceral the experience the more likely the reader will want to visit again.

For my debut novel Bone Dust White, I’ve created the fictional town of Collier, but placed it in a very real location, the Flathead Valley in Northern Montana. Collier is an amalgamation of places I’ve visited and read about. This is small town America viewed with a long lens. I don’t claim to be an expert. This is fiction. I wanted the backdrop of my novel to be as down in its luck and hard bitten as its residents. Collier is claustrophobic in scale and the harsh winter storms and darkness that sweep in as the novel opens only serve to make the atmosphere more sinister. It is set on the borders with Canada and surrounded by deep impenetrable forests that jut up against the Whitefish Mountains. The main highway goes straight through town, clogging Main Street with eighteen wheelers and choking its residents with exhaust fumes. The Flathead River flows around in the town like a ‘distended belly’. Once a source of commerce for the closed saw mills, the only thing the river carries now is debris washed down from the higher elevations. Crime, high employment, prostitution, alcoholism and meth addiction are among its more visible problems.

It is within this backdrop that a haunted young girl named Grace Adams comes of age in the cruelest of ways. Having been given a new lease on life she is finally ready to embrace her future on her own terms, but there are forces working against her. She witnesses a brutal murder just yards from her back gate and as the woods close in on her and the victim she once again retreats into herself. This is truly a case of her past coming in from the cold and she will have to negotiate a tangled web of betrayals if she’s going to survive. Detective Macy Greeley is the outsider brought in by the state to investigate the murder as it is believed to be linked to an unsolved case she worked 11 years earlier. She to must peel away layers of lies and complicated family feuds as she works a case that will bring the town of Collier to its knees.

I feel I’ve created the perfect backdrop for my novel Bone Dust White and I hope the town of Collier haunts my readers for years to come. Are there locations and settings both real and imagery that have left an impression on you as a reader? Are there writers out there who choose locations for reasons that I may not have entertained? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

DEBS: We have some interesting cross-cultural things going on this week as well: I'm an American who chooses to write British crime novels, Peter Robinson is a Yorkshire native who lives in Canada but sets his books in Yorkshire, and Karin is an American who lives in London and chose to set her novel in Montana. Does our physical distance from our setting make it more intriguing for us as writers?


Karin will be giving away a copy of BONE DUST WHITE to one of today's lucky commenters, so get your name in the hat!
 
KARIN SALVALAGGIO received in MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck at the University of London. Born is West Virginia and raised in an Air Force family, she grew up on a number of military bases around the United States. She now lives in London with her two children. Bone Dust White is her first novel. http://www.karinsalvalaggio.com/

What We're Reading

LUCY BURDETTE: today was supposed to be our new Red Susan's day to strut her stuff. But she got waylaid--it's an incredible story and she'll tell it all next week. So today we're talking about what we're reading, and we'd love to hear your recommendations too!

I just finished Kristan Higgins's new romance, THE PERFECT MATCH. She's brilliant at swoony but not gooey love stories with fully-fleshed out characters. I'm always sad to see one end.

 






And now my bookmark is in Sujata Massey's new historical novel, THE SLEEPING DICTIONARY. So far it's about an Indian girl whose home and family is wiped out by a tsunami, and also about India's fight for freedom. I loved Massey's mysteries set in Japan, so I'm betting this will be a great read too.

HALLIE EPHRON: I just finished THE SILENT WIFE. Everyone said, if you liked GONE GIRL (and I did, very much) then you'll like THE SILENT WIFE (I did.) Less nasty and just as wicked, it tells the story Jodi and Todd in a "perfect" marriage. They live in a lovely home where she makes lovely meals and he mixes her perfect martinis. A psychotherapist, all day long Jodi listens to self-deluding patients, all the while in a state of denial herself as she puts up with being married to man who is "not good at monogamy." Until she snaps. 

Also reading ORPHAN TRAIN by Christina Baker Kline and loving it. There are two linked stories -- one tells of the friendship between a 91-year-old woman and a 17-year-old alienated foster child who is sentenced to community service work for stealing her favorite book from the library. They are both orphans. The second story is of an Irish orphan girl shipped west, as so many children were in the late 20s, in nearly Dickensian circumstances, in the hope of finding a family and a future.

RHYS BOWEN: I wish I could tell you what I'm reading, but I can't, because once again I'm chairing an MWA contest and I can't tell you anything about it. But I can tell you that the submissions start at a trickle and by the deadline they turn into a flood. So reading away at things that are not always my cup of tea and looking forward to picking up my TBR pile that has Julia's new book at the top of it.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  I am reading Linwood Barclay's A TAP AT THE WINDOW.Reds, he is SO fabulous. It's sinister, but possible-- realistic but creepy, normal-with-a-twist. Exactly the kind of book I love. I want to be him when I grow up.

Rachel Howzell Hall's LAND OF SHADOWS--tough, gritty, smart, so original. A book to watch out for: ICE SHEAR by MP Cooley. A terrific main character in a debut that's seamlessly natural! Watch for it. I also read a soon to be published manuscript by Marilyn Levinson called MURDER a la CHRISTIE, which  is adorable. Go, Marilyn, and good luck! 

Finally, I sat down to read a couple of chapters of Lisa Scottoline's ACCUSED--and never got up. It's a page-turner, and pure wonderful Lisa. 

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  I just finished a galley of a debut novel called BONE DUST WHITE by a writer named Karin Salvalaggio. Funny thing, Karin

is an American who lives in London and sets her stories in--are you ready?  Minnesota. I think there is a little irony where I am concerned, but this is a great, polished read, with a female detective readers will love.  And if you thought Julia's Through the Evil Days made you feel cold, just wait for this one!

Now I'm reading the new Theresa Maclean novel, The Price of Innocence,  by Lisa Black, who will be our guest on Tuesday.  I love this series, so this is a real treat.

I think I'm seeing a strong female detective thread here...