Which Way Do I Go? by Jenn McKinlay

You think you know a person. But do you ever, really? I’ve been long time friends with mystery writer Kate Carlisle. We met while signing at the Poisoned Pen and bonded over pre book signing salads (okay, it was Bloody Marys, but in our defense there are a lot of vegetables in there) and we’ve been tight ever since. Clearly, showing up marginally inebriated at a book signing is a bond that can’t be denied.

Anyway, when our conference schedules, line up, we like to room together so we can talk shop, throw plots at each other, and otherwise pal around. Naturally, when we knew we were both going to Bouchercon in Toronto, we shacked up. Now up until now, I have been able to keep a secret from Kate, but on this trip my subterfuge gave out and she discovered my dark secret…

I have zero sense of direction. Zip, Zero. Nada. I might as well live in a black hole because I have no idea where I’m going ninety percent of the time. The jig was up with Kate the third time I left our hotel room and went the wrong way to get to the elevator.

“Turn around, sweetie, you’re headed for the ice machine,” she said. “Again.”

Thus, my inability to find my way out of a paper bag was revealed. 

Turns out the party responsible for my inability to navigate is my brain. According to an article from Scientific American:"After wandering around an unfamiliar part of town, can you sense which direction to travel to get back to the subway or your car? If so, you can thank your entorhinal cortex, a brain area recently identified as being responsible for our sense of direction. Variation in the signals in this area might even explain why some people are better navigators than others."

You can read more here: Sense of Direction

So how about you, Reds? Do you have a good sense of direction or are you perpetually taking the scenic route like me?

LUCY BURDETTE: Aha, you've stumbled onto a major marital disagreement in our home. My family and I think we are gifted in the directional field, and John thinks we are duds. He's always surprised when we disagree on what waiting to turn and come to find out that I was correct. He calls my brother "gyro"--short for gyroscope, as he likes to tease him about his sense of direction too. I will admit that I can't find my way around Venice (Italy) as I find their winding streets impenetrable. But give me Rome, New York, or Paris and I am your girl!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Horrible. Horrible. I am so bad at directions that if I say: "I am always wrong, so I think it's this way, so let's go that way," I'm STILL WRONG.  Maps, I can read them, and direct people just fine, but it doesn't translate spatially, somehow. In hotels? I am ALWAYS wrong, and now consciously figure out which way to turn and try to remember that (toward the fire extinguisher, or away from the staircase sign) , otherwise, it doesn't matter how many times I try it, I'm wrong. It kind of bothers me. I have good instincts about other things, but dead reckoning somehow passed me by.  You and me, sister Jenn. Can you imagine us together?

JENN: Oh, wow, you are my people, Hank! I am ALWAYS WRONG, too. Scenic route, we're definitely taking the scenic route.

INGRID THOFT: Stick with me, Jenn and Hank.  I have a stellar sense of direction.  I credit my father, who was excellent at navigating, too.  I’m great with maps, GPS, and, essentially, just knowing if A is over here, and K is over there, G will be here.  During the Phoenix Bouchercon, Chevy Stevens and Carla Buckley nicknamed me Head Goose; they knew if they fell into formation behind me, they’d arrive at their desired destination.  The one place that throws me off my game?  A wooded town not far from Seattle on the other side of Lake Washington.  My hubby’s office is there, and I think it’s the universe’s way of keeping me humble!

JENN: I'll fall in line with you anytime, Head Goose! LOL - that's adorable!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I'm in the good sense of direction camp, although perhaps not so well-developed as Ingrid's! I only just got a smartphone in 2015, so before then, all my navigating was done with maps and bushwhacking. Can you see the sun and shadows? Okay, you have east and west, and from that north and south. If you have a map in your head of the major roads in your area- the county highway and the Turnpike, say - then you aim yourself toward one of those. I guess the important part of all that is "map in your head." 

JENN: Yeah, you lost me at "map in your head". I, too, got a smart phone in 2015 and it's been helpful, when I choose to believe the GPS, which for some reason I don't, so we spend a lot of time doing "legal U-turns" and "recalibrating routes". 

JULIA: The one place my directional sense failed me completely? Driving around Seattle. Having lived in Maine for nearly all my adult life, with the Atlantic to the east and New Hampshire's White mountains to the west, I kept getting turned around between the Pacific and the Cascade range. "Water is East!" my brain insisted. "Mountains are West!" I was like a bird without magnetism, flapping fruitlessly in circles.

HALLIE EPHRON: Oh well, Seattle is impossible. Weren't the streets on those 'hills' deliberately routed so the families who 'ruled' them didn't have to drive through each other's neighborhoods? And Venice! When we were there the vaporettos were on strike and we had to walk everywhere. Often in circles (haven't we been on this bridge before?)

I used to have a great sense of direction but now I'm like Hank. Always exactly wrong, and even when I turned it around and go the opposite way of what I think, I'm wrong. It all began at the Grand Hyatt in NYC. It feels to me as if it's on the SOUTH side of 42nd St and I orient everything that way. Now, even when I read a map, I get it upside down and backwards.

JENN: Okay, then, if we're ever in Seattle, Head Goose is in charge!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I like maps. I can usually read maps without having to hold them upside down! And I have usually prided myself on my sense of direction, especially after wandering my way around London with nothing but an A to Z (That's pronounced "A to Zed", by the way) for years. But I've had a couple of major failures. There was the time I hired a car at Heathrow  and then circumnavigated the airport for TWO hours trying to get on the road to Henley. That I blame entirely on the stupid SatNav and the lack of an actual paper map. Once I found a place to stop (not easy on English roads), turned off the SatNav, and bought a proper map, I made it to Henley in half a hour.

But then there was last year in London, which I can blame on nothing but myself. I'd convinced a long-suffering friend to meet me for dinner at a place I wanted to try, in a part of London I don't know well at all. I was turned around from the minute I got off the bus. Even with Google Maps on my phone, I somehow managed to walk miles in the wrong direction. Around and around in circles, three more buses (two of them going in the wrong direction) later,  I finally reached the restaurant, thirty minutes late. Maybe that was my Grand Hyatt moment, and I'll be confused from now on!

JENN: I opted not to drive in London, Debs, so I am in awe of you!

RHYS BOWEN: I have a good sense of direction but I'm married to a man with zero. We're driving through Phoenix which is completely on a grid and I say, "We go north on 24th Street" and he says "Which way is North?" and I say..."See that mountain? It's called NORTH MOUNTAIN. Does that give you a clue?"

But I have a Venice story: which I was a teenager my parents used to rent a little villa outside Venice. They'd drive onto the island, give me and my brother some money and say "See you at five o'clock." And we'd spend all day wandering the streets. So I knew them well. Years later I took my oldest daughter back. We started to walk around the city and suddenly I'd say, "Wait. If we go through that alleyway and cut behind that church we should find ourselves.... Yes! Short cut to Rialto." It all came back to me.

JENN: I am embarrassed to admit how long it took me to figure out the Phoenix grid, Rhys. One year, maybe two? Ugh.

What about you, Readers? How's your navigational system or more precisely your entorhinal cortex?

A Chilling Challenge: a guest post by S.J. Bolton

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I have to confess, I thought I "discovered" S.J. Bolton. Last year, I picked up Now You See Me, the first mystery in her DC Lacey Flint series. I ripped through it and went looking for the next, Dead Scared. I was recommending the books to friends, patting myself on the back on being able to introduce people to this great unknown British author... until I found out she wasn't really that unknown. In fact, she's been shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger, the Theakston's Old Peculier prize for crime novel of the year, the International Thriller Writers' Best First Novel award and the Mary Higgins Clark award (four times in a row! Her thriller Awakening won that one.)

Okay, I wasn't the first to find out about Sharon Bolton. But - and here we get to today's theme - I wouldn't have discovered her if I hadn't been reading out of my comfort zone. Like a lot of us, I had fallen into the habit of picking up a narrow range of books. British police procedurals (excepting our own Deb Crombie's series) were not on the list. But last year, I challenged myself to dig into books that I normally wouldn't seek out. And you know what? It was a great experience. Here's S.J. (Sharon) Bolton to tell us about her pushing the envelope moments.

Photo: Modernista

On Mothers’ Day this year (10th March in the UK) I ran a five km race through ankle-deep mud. I scaled hills, fell down slopes, crawled through drainpipes, clambered over hay-bales and waded through waist-deep water. I didn’t cover myself in glory (I finished 4^th from last) nor did I behave with great dignity. ‘Feel free to give me a shove up the arse,’ I told the man who was coming up behind me in the pipe. ‘Can’t,’ he replied. ‘My shorts are coming down.’

I’m not a natural runner. But my son runs, and I’ve learned that the key to family cohesion can lie in common interests; even if this invariably pushes parents way beyond their comfort zones.

I run so that I can share something with my son. Physical fitness is a fringe benefit. Another is the emotional growth that comes from the willingness to embracing a new challenge.

Now, life lessons can often be applied to writing, I find. Writers who grow are those who stretch themselves. Not so long ago, I met another writer at a dinner. She described herself, several times, as an ‘unsuccessful writer.’ After a while I asked the obvious - what kind of writer she might consider to be successful? ‘Someone whose books are in shops, not just libraries,’ she replied. I was tempted to feel sorry for her. Until she went on to tell me that for the last twenty years she’d written and published two books a year. ‘Stop it, now!’ I wanted to yell at her. ‘Take a break, clear your head, and then WRITE SOMETHING DECENT!’

This was a writer, forever trapped in her comfort zone, forever doomed to be disappointed.

I will not be one of these, even though, ultimately, I may end up shooting myself in the foot. (I thought my publishers would dump me over my third book BLOOD HARVEST – three major re-writes before it was accepted.)

I didn’t want to be labeled a writer of English rural gothic so with my fourth book I went urban. I wanted to see if I could pull off a credible police procedural, so made all my main characters police officers. I wondered if I could write an engaging series character, so created Lacey Flint. It was a major change and not everyone liked it. A writer friend accused me of going over to the dark side, because of the book’s twin themes of sexual abuse and violence against women.

It’s hard, isn’t it? When you’re living the life you dreamed of, (that plenty of others still long for) when armed with a reasonably successful product, you find yourself on the book-a-year treadmill. It’s hard to step off when you know you might never get back on again. Thunderous applause, therefore, to Gillian Flynn, whose first novel came out six years ago. GONE GIRL followed a four year gap. Flynn took her time. She had confidence in herself. She produced an absolute masterpiece.

I’m not that brave. But I do feel the time has come for a change. I’m finishing off my fifth Lacey Flint story and it’s been an effort. Not that I’m tired of Lacey, but I think I’ve gone as far as I can with this series for now. Time to move on.

What I’m reasonably good at is plotting (although it has been suggested that my readers don’t so much suspend disbelief as throw it gleefully out of the window) and my books are totally story driven. I’m less good at characterization. Most crime writers veer naturally towards one or the other, I find. If they’re character led writers, they write psychological crime. If action led, they write thrillers and action-packed mysteries.

I want to see if I can write a book in which very little happens. A book that’s success hinges on whether the characters work or not.

So, there will be no subterranean chases, no helicopter rescues, no mythical creatures lurking in the shadows and no rural communities haunted by the mistakes and ghosts of their past. There will be three people, whose lives have been destroyed by a single event, and who deal with it in very separate ways.

You know what, I think I’d rather be stuck in a muddy pipe with a half naked stranger.

 Are you willing to step out of your comfort zone, dear readers? How have you challenged yourselves in the past year - and in the year going forward? Let us know, and one lucky commenter will win the hardcover of Dead Scared!

Sharon's new Lacey Flint short story, IF SNOW HADN’T FALLEN, is published on 2 April (ebook only) and the new book, LOST, is out in June. You can find out more about S.J. Bolton, and read excerpts from her books, at her website.  You can friend her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter as @authorsjbolton, share reviews with her on Goodreads and enjoy her writing on her blog.

 

JEFF ABBOTT: THE LAST MINUTE

DEBORAH CROMBIE: THRILLER WEEK on Jungle Red has become THRILLER FORTNIGHT, and we start it off with a bang (couldn't resist the July 4th pun) as our very good friend (and my fellow Texan) Jeff Abbott tells us about his new Sam Capra novel, THE LAST MINUTE, out today. Here's to great summer reading!

Writing a Direct Sequel: THE LAST MINUTE by Jeff Abbott

THE LAST MINUTE, the second Sam Capra novel, comes out today and it's not just a second novel in a series--it's a direct sequel. And that creates some special challenges in writing, none of which I quite anticipated when I started.

The first Sam novel, ADRENALINE, chronicles the destruction of Sam's life. His seven-months pregnant wife is kidnapped before his eyes as his CIA office in London is bombed. He is accused of treason, thrown into a CIA prison, and then used as unwilling bait for the bad guys. Desperate to find his wife and the son he’s never seen, Sam escapes the agency to find out why a mysterious criminal network has stolen his family. ADRENALINE, somewhat unusually for a series opener, ends on a cliffhanger. I think readers are more tolerant of this than they used to be: perhaps we've been conditioned to enjoy cliffhangers more, given television shows like LOST, BREAKING BAD, and THE WALKING DEAD. I got a lot of emails asking if there would be another Sam book, and out of the dozens I received I think only one was annoyed with me. (The reader still vowed to read the next book, however.)

So the challenge with THE LAST MINUTE is that there is a major plot thread -- Sam's desperate search for his son Daniel -- that carries from one book to another. Here's what I did to try to make it as impactful as I could for those who had read ADRENALINE and those who might be coming to the series fresh:

--Open with the main story: No prologues, no set up. The first scene of THE LAST MINUTE is Sam and his mysterious partner in crime, Mila, pretending to be a couple desperate to adopt a baby through illicit channels in a gamble to find out where his son is. That works because it sets up very quickly the main dramatic question of the book, while carrying the action forward from the ending of ADRENALINE. We know Sam’s child has been taken but it’s not Sam telling us all this for a full page. We learn the backstory through Sam’s action.

--Give the readers the details they need, but don't give them a lecture: No one wants a big flashback to set up the previous action, or a long-winded monologue. I added in the details as quickly and cleanly as I could, and in the rewriting of the book I pruned and weeded. Over the first few chapters I parceled out information carefully, trying to make it organic as part of what Sam, or his enemy, is doing at that moment. I gave the most background in one scene: but the focus on the scene is what the bad guys are doing to manipulate Sam, how they are using his son as a weapon to bend Sam to their will—and to force Sam to find and kill the one man who can bring the bad guys down. It's not so much about history as about moving forward with the current story.

--Embrace the unique opportunities: This was entirely unplanned, but was one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing a direct sequel. I needed a major character for this book, a person to be the target that Sam is chasing. If he kills the target, he gets his son back from the bad guys. The target can destroy the bad guys, so there's an irony that this is the man Sam must kill—a man who should be Sam’s ally. So I needed a smart, capable, even sympathetic character to fill the role of the target. For a while I played around with a number of characters, but then I thought, since the book is a direct sequel, could I use a character from ADRENALINE? And so I found my solution: a character who is unnamed, who is on maybe three pages of ADRENALINE and appears to meet with misfortune. In Star Trek parlance, you'd call him a redshirt. For THE LAST MINUTE, I made it clear he hadn’t died, shaped him into a major character, which made me ask a ton of questions about how he got to be in such a bad situation in ADRENALINE. I built a whole history for him. And that was great fun, and a terrific technical challenge, to be true to the very few things we know about the character in the first book and give him a very dramatic history and a personality all his own in the second. If THE LAST MINUTE wasn't such a direct sequel, then I probably wouldn't have done this -- I would have invented a new character. This was much more fun.

Not every series needs a direct sequel among its offerings. Not every readership is patient for it. I'll probably never do it again -- but a parent's search for his child is just the kind of dramatic situation that can carry this sort of set-up.

Would you ever write a direct sequel? What do you think the challenges would be?

Jeff Abbott is the New York Times bestselling author of ADRENALINE, PANIC, COLLISION, and other suspense novels. Last year ADRENALINE was the only novel to be a Summer Great Read pick by both Good Morning America and The TODAY Show. He is a three-time Edgar Award nominee and a two-time nominee for the Thriller and Anthony Awards. He lives with his family in Austin. You can follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jeffabbottbooks or on Twitter at @jeffabbott.

DEBS:  Jeff, I found this fascinating, both because I have written a direct sequel, and because I'm thinking of doing it again. It does set the writer a unique set of challenges, and it really ups the ante on the "how much information to include from previous books" issue, something that is the bane of those of us who write series novels.

What about you, readers?  How do you feel about cliffhangers? Are you willing to wait? Jeff will be checking in today to answer your questions and comments, so please stop by and say "hi."

And Happy Pub Day, Jeff!!!