A Backstory Dilemma

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Well, sure, things were different then. On the fourth of July—and we hope you had a pleasant one—we would take sparklers and bend the handles, and then light them a twirl them in the backyard. At NIGHT. And no one yelled at us.

Did you have a fun childhood? Mine is—hazy. There’s a whole chunk of haze, times that melt into each other in a fuzzy way, not very differentiated. But I guess it was basically good haze, though, with minor dilemmas: school competitions, favorite teachers, beloved books and spelling bees, math fears, adventures on horseback, “shows” in the backyard and “only” divorce (and infinite sibling rivalry) as a potential trauma. All in all, though, fine. I think I came through undamaged.

And that has the wonderful Michele Dorsey (a fabulous true friend of the Reds and ...here she is as an adorable child!) wondering, I guess, if I would be a good protagonist in a novel. (And happy pub week, darling Michele!)

MICHELE DORSEY: My friends and I were sitting on a porch the other day having a lazy, rambling summer conversation, when one accused another of having a happy childhood. The rest of us pounced on the poor woman who dared to recount a happy memory while we poised ready to detail our miserable childhoods. As I listened, I realized how fertile a field a miserable childhood is for a writer and how many of my characters have suffered through one. Can a character whose childhood was happy be a worthy protagonist?

In my new standalone suspense novel, Gone But Not Forgotten (July 2023 Severn House), Olivia Rose Taylor had worse than a miserable childhood. Hers was stolen when her mother fled an abusive husband who threatened to murder them and relocated to Vermont under new identities. Olivia is forced to live in obscurity so as not to bring attention and endanger them. Her mother is diagnosed with dementia before Olivia can convince her to reveal their identity, which Olivia is desperate to learn before she starts a family of her own. Just as Olivia finds the courage to search for the identity of her family of origin, someone sets out to stop her.

If Olivia didn’t have a crappy childhood, I wouldn’t have had a story to tell. Someone merely trying to kill her isn’t nearly as intriguing as having dark, ancient family secret as the motivation.

I began thinking about other characters I’ve written. Sabrina Salter in my series, (No Virgin Island, Permanent Sunset, Tropical Depression, Salt Water Wounds), on St. John in the Virgin Islands had a wretched childhood. Her mother abandoned her when she was a toddler, leaving Sabrina with a drunken father, and a maternal grandmother who wouldn’t acknowledge her. No wonder Sabrina found love in all the wrong places and ended up killing her husband, even if it was an accident. When I pondered about two works in progress, I realized the protagonists in both had troubled childhoods. Am I fixated with rough childhoods? Was I channeling my own, which I would characterize as glum, a word that just popped into my head.

But wait. Lots of characters in books I have loved had crappy childhoods. Who didn’t love Kinsey Millhone, the protagonist created by Sue Grafton in her alphabet series about an orphan raised by a stern aunt. Kinsey was scarred and quirky, but we rooted for her. Barbara Havers in Elizabeth George’s Thomas Lynley series, plagued by bad habits like smoking and eating junk food, is still having a miserable childhood well into adulthood. She’s the character in the series who rises above the aristocracy and creeps into our hearts.

Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins may take the prize for traumatized childhoods. Rawlins was a black child born poor in Louisiana, orphaned by the age of eight, who jumped a boxcar to Texas, where he became self-educated in skills from sewing to literature.

The list of protagonists with tortured childhoods is long. Ann Cleeves has given us Vera and Matthew Venn, both with dark childhoods. Michael Connelly has graced us with Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller, who had the same father but didn’t meet until adulthood. Both had blighted, but different beginnings.

Can a character be interesting without having had a miserable childhood? Does anyone in life honestly have a valid claim they had a happy one? Or are we simply living in an age that invites us to wallow in misery? Do I read and write about people who had desolate beginnings because I want to experience their ultimate triumphs or to find comfort and camaraderie?

I’d love to hear from the Reds about the experiences of their characters and whether their own childhoods affect how they create the backgrounds of them. How do readers feel about the flawed characters who are the products of sad beginnings?

In the end, I am a sucker for a happy ending, and what better way than to have a character who starts life one rung down climb to the top of the ladder?


HANK: How about you, Reds and readers? Writers, do your characters have flawed childhoods? Or readers, would YOU be a good protagonist?

C. Michele Dorsey is the author of Oh Danny Girl and the Sabrina Salter series, including No Virgin Island, Permanent Sunset, Tropical Depression, and Salt Water Wounds. Her latest novel, Gone But Not Forgotten will be published by Severn House in July 2023.Michele is a lawyer, mediator, former adjunct law professor and nurse, who didn’t know she could be a writer when she grew up. Now that she does, Michele writes constantly, whether on St John, outer Cape Cod, or anywhere within a mile of the ocean.

Lucy is Ready for her Close-up @LucyBurdette

LUCY BURDETTE: I can't say that I'm writing much of anything other than press releases, to-do lists, and emails. Though I did turn in the first draft of A DISH TO DIE FOR on September 1st, and I've been catching up on life since then. I have another book to write in the Key West series, but I have no title and no plot. I do have some idea fragments about what will be going on in Miss Gloria's life (involving the scone sisters from A SCONE OF CONTENTION.) And those ideas make me rub my hands in anticipation.

Other than that, I am super excited about the upcoming launch of UNSAFE HAVEN. Severn House is a new-to-me publisher that mainly targets the library market in both the UK and the US. (Though I am hoping many fans of the Key West mysteries will consider giving it a try.) This was a bonus book that I had about given up on when my agent sold it. The publisher designed a wonderful cover, and the book tells a great story (she said modestly.) Here’s what our Hank had to say about it: 

Devastating, heartbreaking and completely immersive. This riveting story of fear and redemption, motherhood and second chances, and our responsibility to strangers is a powerful thriller proving one split-second decision can change our lives forever.  UNSAFE HAVEN has Hollywood written all over it!   Hank Phillippi Ryan, USA Today bestselling author of HER PERFECT LIFE 

And that started me thinking: What if it really was made into a TV show or a movie? Of all the books I've written, Unsafe Haven is probably the story most suited for that. I thought I might post a bit of what Kirkus said about Unsafe Haven and then see if you’d help me brainstorm. 

Kirkus said: In a major departure from her lighthearted Key West mysteries, Burdette invites readers into the world of a chilling thriller. A page-turner highlighting the problem of exploited runaways.

New York City medical student Elizabeth Brown was jilted by her fiancé a few days before their wedding, and she's taking the subway to visit a friend who'll commiserate when a frantic-looking girl hands her a bundle that turns out to be a newborn baby. After phoning the police, she makes the mistake of calling a number she finds in the coat wrapping the baby. This call immerses her in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with people she naïvely believes want to help. The baby’s mother, 16-year-old Addison, is running for her life from a woman who took her in as a young runaway and turned her into a prostitute. Unable to forget the baby after turning her over to the police, Elizabeth, herself adopted, gives an interview to a reporter that only exposes her to more danger….Only quick thinking and grit will save their lives.

Here's how I picture the logline: After a teenage runaway gives birth in a subway and thrusts the baby into the arms of a newly jilted bride, all three must run to escape danger. (Hmmm, or should I end that sentence with Kirkus's last line above?)

In addition to a little word-smithing above, these are the questions I’d love to get opinions on…Is there an actress who comes to mind to play Addy and/or Elizabeth? Addy is a teenager, small and fragile-looking and dark-haired. Elizabeth is more stocky, in her twenties, with blonde curls and blue eyes. Another character who might be fun to cast is Detective Jack Meigs (originally from the advice column mysteries.) He’s in his fifties, with reddish curls tinged with gray. He’s gruff and intimidating on the outside, but tender underneath, reeling from his own kind of pain. (My husband suggested Michael Kitchen from Foyle's War--who might be a bit too old, but is otherwise perfect.)

And while you’re thinking of characters, can you identify a TV show or movie that sounds somewhat similar? Even if none of this goes anywhere, it’s fun to think about.

Ways to pre-order your copy of UNSAFE HAVEN:

Book depository 

Indiebound 

Barnes and Noble 

Amazon 

Severn House 

And if this is not in your budget (which I totally get,) you can invite your local library to order a copy!

Barbara Hambly on Naming Names

JAN BROGAN _  Since Barbara Hambly's  first published fantasy in 1982 – The Time of the Dark – she has touched most bases in genre fiction: her most recent vampire novel is The Magistrates of Hell (Severn House, 2012) and her most recent historical whodunnit, Ran Away, continues the well-reviewed Benjamin January series. She also writes historical mysteries as Barbara Hamilton (The Ninth Daughter, and its sequels A Marked Man and Sup With the Devil). In addition – when she can – she writes short fiction about the further adventures of characters from her fantasy novels of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

NAMING NAMES

by Barbara Hambly

            How is it that the villain’s evil henchmen are always named things like Ugmush and Weevil?

            Did Mr. and Mrs. Orc, gazing adoringly upon their little hatchling, exclaim, “How cute he is! How dimpled and sweet! Let’s call him Ugmush!”

            Or is “Ugmush” Orcish for “Bright Hope”?

            (How would you tell?)

            I’m as guilty as anyone else in this department. I spend a lot of time over the names of my characters, trying on one after another, as if the names were reflections of – and clues to – their personalities.

            Villains are easy. You can tell Charles Dickens had a lot of fun in that department: names like Skimpole and Krook, Bumble and Scrooge and Dedlock, all reek of petty viciousness. Dickens had a beautiful knack for making extremely English-sounding names that were sly digs at those who labored under them. I try to do the same, with occasional (I think) success. In the Benjamin January series, I generally thumb through my well-worn glossary of archaic colonial English, to find words for vile things which I then make the names of slave-dealers in the stories, names like Gleet (a genital sore caused by venereal disease) or Mulm (the disgusting green amalgam of algae and fish-poo that develops at the bottom of an aquarium if you don’t clean it often enough).

         
   Heroes, sidekicks, and secondary characters (whom I persist in thinking of as “guest stars” thanks to WAY too much television as a child) require a different combination of euphony and likelihood. Though in Real Life people generally receive their names completely at random, in a novel, a hero has to sound like a hero… or at least not sound trivial. For whatever reason, and I’m not sure why, some names sound stronger than others. Not many people would take seriously a spy named Clarence Bond. Or Ted Bond. It could be done, but the writer of the book had better be damn good to carry it off. Yet Clarence, or Theodore, are perfectly good English names (along with such other rejects as Evelyn, Wilf, Howard, and Alfred).  And in fact they’d be fine for a secondary character – a cab-driver, or the friendly shlub that the villain kills in Chapter Two just to prove what a rotter he is.

            But not for the hero.

           
I have a whole shelf of name-the-baby books for this purpose, the best of which is Peoples’ Names, by Holly Ingraham (MacFarland Press), which was written for role-players and divides them up by nationality, gender, and, wonderfully, time-period. In the Middle Ages, nearly everybody was named Henry or Matilda. I’ll admit I’m a perfectionist, but nothing drops me out of a romance quicker than twelfth-century heroines named Brittany. When writing about that time-period, one has to work with a fairly small list of female names, though after the Protestant Reformation you get a slew of Biblicals and with the Renaissance you acquire all sorts of classical Greek and Roman options.

            The book also has typical last names (for those eras that used such things), but often I’ll either comb through research books for the names of contributers or archivists (Guillenormand       sounds, for some reason, a lot more authentically French than the usual fallbacks like LaSalle and Dumonde), or I’ll do what Georgette Heyer did, and look for place-names in an atlas. How much more English can you get than Marden or Kinver? Some people simply use telephone directories. I am frequently reminded of that scene in The Mighty Aphrodite, where Woody Allen and Helena Bonham Carter are trying to come up with a name for their adopted infant: Eric? Groucho? Phileas? Phileas is a guy who forecloses on a mortgage…

            It’s a comfort to me to know that Dickens occasionally did what I do, and named all the major characters in the book names which start with the same letter (my editors are always getting on me for that): Smallweed, Snagsby, Summerson, Skimpole in the same tale. I catch myself doing that and then I have to fumfer around looking for another name that has the same “ring”. (My current project, one of the “guest stars” has gone through about seven different names. Either they just don’t sound quite right, or they’re too similar to somebody else’s in the same story.) (Or else I discover – with the same sort of “unconscious plagiarism” suffered by George Harrison when he wrote “My Sweet Lord” to a tune that turned out to be the old Chiffons hit, “He’s So Fine” – that the name that sounds so right, sounds so right because I’ve heard it someplace else, like Robert Morley or Thomas Wyatt or, famously, Ford Prefect. That’s where a quick pass through Google really helps).

            And of course, once you get into fantasy, all bets are off. Though I will say that random name-generators that simply mash letters, more often than not produce things that don’t sound like names. One can’t – or at least I can’t – imagine anyone’s friends really saying, “Hi, Mrsquipx, how’s it going?” Anyone who hangs out long enough on World of Warcraft is familiar with this phenomenon. Again, it’ll work occasionally for cab-drivers but not for the hero. And anyway, the last time I was putting together ideas for a fantasy, an editor told me that people seem to prefer those sort of almost-English names (like Bilbo, Frodo, Pippin and John Stark) that are easier to remember, rather than Azathoth and Frasticarion.

            Are other writers as OCD about their characters’ names as I am?

            Do other people fret and fuss and try them on and off like sweaters, trying to get them just right? (Margaret Mitchell called her heroine Pansy O’Hara all the way up to the final draft of Gone With the Wind… PANSY???)

            Often when I’m putting together a new story, the first day consists of just writing lists of names: Who ARE these people?

            Pansy O’Hara, meet Wilfred “Skippy” Bond…

*

            Where do you get your character names from? How important are names, anyway?

Barbara's short fiction  can be purchased via download from her website, www.barbarahambly.com. She teaches History part-time, and if you’re interested in her views on the weather, her cats, World of Warcraft, and sometimes writing, you can read her blog at barbara_hambly@ livejournal.com. She also does Twitter. Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.

Clea Simon

JAN BROGAN: Clea Simon is the author of 10 mysteries and three nonfiction books.  Her latest mysteries are “Grey Expectations” (Severn House), featuring the feline ghost Mr. Grey, and the Booklist-starred “Cats Can’t Shoot” (Poisoned Pen), which hosts several dogs as well as the curmudgeonly tabby Wallis. She, her husband Jon, and their tuxedo cat Musetta live in Somerville, Mass., where Clea and Musetta have taken to watching the birds together, sometimes with bad intent.   Please welcome her to Jungle Red! 




CLEA SIMON:  I’m an animal lover. And as they are in my writing, critters of one sort or another are essential to my life. Even, sometimes, ghost pets. Animals. I love them so much I can’t let them go. So you wouldn’t think I’d be throwing plates at critter, would you? Attempting to kill one, in cold blood?

What’s worse, there were witnesses. But I can explain.

To start with, I live in the city. Yes, we now have a little yard and I’ve gotten a bit obsessive about my bird feeder, doing my best to lure the cardinals and finches and discourage the ravenous sparrows (aka “pigbirds”) with every combination of seed and suet available. And I’m enough of a cat person that I keep up on the news of coyotes (there’s supposedly a pack in the woods of nearby Mt. Auburn Cemetary) and those nasty, weaselly fishers (spotted only one town farther out!) that are reclaiming their territory. But I’ve got an indie coffeehouse a five minute walk away, and two world-class bookstores within 20. There are buses and subways, and the sounds of sirens. I like it that way. It feels civilized.

So imagine my surprise when a friend dropped by and said, “You know, you’ve got a wild turkey at the end of your street.” I was wearing socks, no shoes, when I opened the door and I immediately ran out to see. Sure enough, a young male (we think) was two doors down, in a neighbor’s driveway, clucking. I ran back to alert Jon and we watched, entranced until we realized that our presence was probably keeping him in that driveway – and that he was likely clucking his distress. And then, being animal lovers, we walked away. We let him be.

Jon returned the favor only four days later, calling to me as he left for work. “Turkey!” He yelled. “On the shed!” Sure enough, the young male – we’re assuming for argument’s sake it was the same bird – was perched on our little tool shed. I watched him, entranced, as he sat, thinking whatever it is that birds think. My neighbor was watching too, and we did the miming thing (“Turkey!”) and waved. Turkey!

All was fine, and I went to get my coffee. And that’s when it happened. The turkey, spurred on by whatever motivates these birds, hopped into my yard. I ran for the camera and caught him pecking at our tiny bit of grass. I thought about going outside, about opening a gate. After all, it was probably easier to hop down into a fenced yard than to hop out of one. And I am, as I may have said, an animal lover. But then the turkey spread his wings and with a few flaps elevated himself to the top of our fence, right by the trellis where I have been training a sweet autumn clematis in hope of September blossoms. Once again, I was in awe.

And then he started eating. No, not eating. Grabbing big beakfuls of leaves and pulling them off, dropping half of them and denuding the young plant. Pulling it off the trellis. And I lost it. Still in my nightshirt, I ran out to our back deck and clapped loudly. Hey, it works with the cat. But the turkey only stared at me, as if to say, “Hey, lady, what’s your problem.” I yelled and clapped some more. No response. More leaves gone.

Finally, I picked up the drainage plate from an empty planter and winged it at him. It fell short – and shattered, our grass not being that thick. And that’s when I realized that I was standing on the deck, in my nightie, screaming bloody murder at a bird. I couldn’t tell if my neighbor was amused or appalled, he dropped his curtain so quickly, but I was forced to confront the dark truth at the bottom of my soul. I am an animal lover. But when forced to defend my clematis, I just may be capable of murder.

JAN: Clea's book, as well as all Severn House mysteries are now available on ebook atAmazon, Kobo, Barnes&Noble, and the Book Depository. You can like Severn House at  http://www.facebook.com/severnhouse
And you can follow at: @severnhouse
Clea will be stopping by to answer your questions about mysteries, animals, or animal mysteries. For more info on her books check out her site at http://www.cleasimon.com