Audiobooks and some literary fashion

JAN BROGAN: When my son was young, he was terrible at any chore you gave him.  His main job was to empty the dishwasher. Each time he left at least three glasses or plates in the upper rack for no apparent reason.  If you asked him to clean his bedroom, he threw the covers on the bed and called it "made," left at least one bureau drawer hanging open, and several pairs of socks still on the floor.  One day in his teens, he decided to put on on his IPOD when I assigned him to clean the finished basement.  After about an hour and half later, when he was still down there, I went to check on him. The basement was spotless and he was still vacuuming. He was having such a good time singing along with the music, he kept looking for new things to clean.  

Well, I find the same thing is happening to me and audiobooks.  Normally, I have little patience for mundane tasks. Like my son, I tend to do as little as I can to get the job over with as soon as possible.   But with an audiobook in my ear, my life had changed. Suddenly, I am a perfectionist. 

A good audiobook can make me walk five miles when I set out to walk three. It can make me paint the trim on the kitchen door I've left unpainted for years.   To finish the Steve Jobs biography, I brought it with me to the track, which I normally consider torture, and ran - round and round and round - two tedious two miles with a smile on my face. I have cleaned closets that I've ignored since we bought the house. And last week, I finally sorted out my junk drawer.

Back when audiobooks came in cassette form, I played them only during long car trips or on airplanes. Now that I can put books on my IPHONE, I pretty much carry an ongoing story everywhere. In the car, at the allergist's office, in an amplifier for when I'm cooking in the kitchen, and upstairs with headphones in my bed when my eyes are too tired to read. 

Recently, I listened to the Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, which I highly recommend for both its great storytelling and the mesmerizing rhythms of the prose. Following Katey's love affair, I found myself scrubbing frantically into the always cruddy corners of my cake pans, first with just the sponge, then with COMET. They now look like they belong in Martha Stuart's kitchen.   Yesterday, I  started Hank's The Other Woman, walked the trails until it got dark, then today added three errands to my task list so that I could finish chapter eight. Tomorrow, I just might reorganize my sock drawer.

SPEAKING OF SOCKS:  This has nothing to do with audiobooks, but I was scrolling through the New York Daily News Pageviews blog and came across a piece on literary fashion trends for hipsters.

These stockings might look good on hipsters, but I think they'd be great for writers, readers, librarians and anyone who spends a lot of time on Jungle Red.  

Wouldn't these be perfect at Bouchercon or the New England Crime Bake? 

In other business:  Nancy was chosen at random from the comments page to win a copy of Edith Maxwell's Speaking of Murder. Please contact me Nancy at janbroganbooks@gmail.com to get your book. 

BACK TO AUDIOBOOKS:  Am I the only one altered by technology? Or has anyone else discovered the amazing motivating ability of audiobooks? 

Mind Games

JAN BROGAN: I've always thought that novel-writing was a little like delivering a baby. Your brain has to deliberately forget all the pain and agony of the event so that you'd consider doing it again.

A new study on motivation (Haung et al, 2010), posted by my favorite blog, PSYBLOG seems to confirm this.  It's all now official: the motivated mind often steps in  with some helpful trickery.

If the new goal is to be achieved, it must be made to seem less daunting. In other words, if viewed realistically, babies wouldn't be born and novels wouldn't be written.

In the study, participants were told they were going to be involved in an ongoing effort to collect one thousand t-shirts to send to refugees in Haiti. To make sure they were motivated, they were given a lot of background on how important their task was, how desperate the state of refugees, and in particular,  how severe a lack of basic clothing.

One group of participants were shown only two full boxes of t-shirts already collected, simulating the feeling we get at the start of a big project, i.e. that there is still a lot of work to do.

These participants coped with this by over-estimating the number of t-shirts already in the bag. In fact, in comparison to an unmotivated control group who thought there were, on average, 92 in the box, those motivated souls committed to the task estimated there were 220 t-shirts.

The overestimating made them feel that the goal was more attainable. A self-delusional jump start.

Towards the end of the project, study participants also had a habit of keeping themselves motivated to completion by  under-estimating the progress they had already made. This helped them  push themselves on harder as they approached the goal, when the temptation is to slack off.

In other words, we lie to ourselves both to start and to finish.

This all makes perfect sense to me,  especially since I am reading the Steve Jobs biography and learning about his reality distortion field. But how about you? Have you ever tricked yourself into starting or completing a goal?

ROSEMARY HARRIS: Happens every time I start a hike! "This isn't that long...I've gone farther at a higher altitude. Look, I've already gone 20% of the way!" It doesn't work quite as well for me with writing - as in "Whaddaymean it's ONLY 300 pages?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Oh, yeah. Every time. "Oh, sure, I can write five hundred words a day starting NOW and the book will be finished ahead of schedule." Ha, ha. Only problem is I never have any idea what I'm doing at the beginning of the book... but if we didn't underestimate how hard it was going to be, I don't know how we'd ever get up the nerve to start.

LUCY BURDETTE: Oh of course, it's fun in the beginning! Anything is possible. We're getting ideas like crazy and thinking of crimes and suspects. Only later does it become clear that we really had NOTHING. Little snatches of ideas with nothing figured out... I'm in that stage now where I need another 50 pages at least--but I've long since outrun my synopsis.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Are you kidding me? Tricking myself is an integral part of my entire life. My clocks are set fast so I'm not late. I SET THE CLOCKS. And then I "forget."  I don't enter my whole paycheck to my checking register--so I think I have less money than I really have. I'M THE ONE WHO ENTERS THE DEPOSITS. I believe my own stratagems. Oh, and I hide money from myself.  I stash $20.00 in a little pocket of my wallet, just in case. I put it there! But I always forget, and then when I  need, it, I'm SO happy!  About writing? I don't need to trick myself. The fear works just fine.

HALLIE EPHRON: Until I started writing fiction, I was one of those annoying people who got everything finished early. Projects. Thank you cards. College essays. It wasn't hard; I just did it. I found it calming to know I was ahead of my deadlines.

The problem with a book is that the deadline when you start is SO FAR OFF.  Now I'm a ditherer, and no 'trick' other than a deadline bearing down on me can get me to buckle down and write. And sometimes even that doesn't work unless I already have figured out what happens next.

RHYS BOWEN: I can't trick myself when it comes to writing. I'm in full blown panic mode at the start of every single book. The voice in my head whispers "You'll never get this story going. It won't be long enough. You'll say all you want to in 50 pages. It will be a horrible failure and they'll want their advance back." So the first 50 pages are like pulling teeth. Then there is a glimmer of hope. I see my way ahead. I start to write faster and with more confidence. By page 150 we are romping along merrily. I'm on my 29th mystery now and you'd think I'd realize that I know how to do it. But I've found that I need the panic mode to make me work. Several friends say the same.Nut cases, all of us.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I suspect in my case it's less "tricking myself" than blindly and optimistically planning that I'll be able to write to my max word count every day and that nothing in the rest of my life will interfere with my work. HA. I have to confess, I do the same when I plan to drive somewhere. If Google maps says it takes one hour fifteen minutes, I'll assume traffic is non-existent AND that I'll pick up time by speeding on the highways. Result: always arriving late and harried. Why do I keep doing this I don't know.

JAN: Yes, Julia, I do the same exact thing whenever I go somewhere and I never understood why I did it. Predictably. Almost compulsively. Then, in my last book, Teaser, my addictive protagonist, Hallie Ahern, became dependent on the adrenaline rush of danger (think the Kennedy clan) and I thought - okay,  now I've written something I really can't relate to, because I don't even like the thrill of boardwalk rides.  But then one day as I was racing around, leaving myself no time and getting harried in traffic, the thought occurred to me:  Maybe I'm doing this for the adreneline rush.  I mean, why else would I put myself through this all the time?

But that's some other study I'm sure!  How about everyone else out there? What mind games do you play to get your goals accomplished?


REMINDER: Melissa Robbins, your name was chosen to win a copy of No Way to Kill a Lady by Nancy Martin.  Please email me at Janbrog@comcast.net  with your snail mail address so Nancy can send you a copy.  Thanks! 

Greatest comebacks...

"I get knocked down, but I get up again
They're never gonna keep me down.."

ROSEMARY HARRIS: Most sports fans would say that comeback victories are more exciting than routs.

Comebacks are thrilling because most of us can identify with the impulse to pull the covers over our heads and want to go to sleep (or...whatever your preferred method of avoidance is) when we suffer a setback. And sometimes that's the right thing to do. Other times, we have to get back up and fight.
We get knocked down but we get up again...like the song says.

Winston Churchill, Robert Downey Jr., much as I hate to reference them, the 2004 Boston Red Sox. People and groups who come back against all the odds are exciting.

They earn our admiration and they inspire us to do better, to not give up. To pay no attention to "the odds" and to keep doing what we are doing. No matter what it is. One book at a time. One base hit at a time. One point at a time.


Yesterday, a little-known Czech tennis player named Lukas Rosol beat Rafael Nadel in the second round at Wimbledon. Rosol lost the first set, it went to five sets. No one - except perhaps Rosol's parents and his coach - were betting on him.  Even if you're not a tennis fan, or a fan of David versus Goliath stories, you have to hand it to a guy who has so much belief in himself that it doesn't matter if thousands of people are expecting him to lose, and in fact cheeringf for him to do so, so that they can eventually see a more marquee matchup.

 Right now I'm thinking of Maria Sharapova, who came back from shoulder surgery to regain the number one ranking and win the French Open last month. But it's not just sports figures. Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Steve Jobs were great comeback stories.

Do you have a favorite comeback story? Someone famous? A family member or friend? Whose story helps you get back up?