In support of nice

HALLIE EPHRON: I just read another essay written by a woman who was pissed off because a stranger told her to “smile.” Because isn’t it so demeaning? And so none of their business? And isn’t it only a woman whom a complete stranger would feel comfortable instructing to Smile? 

I found one explanation in USA Today in an article quoting biological anthropologist Helen Fisher.

"… a lot of men view smiling as subservient, weak and vulnerable. In fact, high-testosterone men do not smile much, and overall use less facial expression. So, telling a woman to smile might be pushing her back into a traditional stereotype."

For the record, I hate it when a complete stranger tells me to smile.  It makes me want to snarl.

And yet, and yet…

Lately I find myself going out of my way to smile. To be pleasant to strangers. To make eye contact. Especially with folks who look different (on any dimension) from me. Because being nice is contagious, and that’s a good thing. You don't even have to speak the same language to do it. It's a tiny effort to counteract the pervasive judgmental nastiness that seems to be thriving out there.

Just yesterday, a driver waved me in, in front of her (or him?) in the congested town square near my house. Lucky for whoever it was, the traffic started moving and I had to stifle the urge the leap from my car, dash back, and hug them.

Instead, I waved. And s/he WAVED BACK! OMG. It lifted my spirits. For the whole day. Plus all day I let other drivers cut in front of me with a wave and a smile.

Call me a good-two-shoes if you like, and please, don’t tell me to smile. Smile yourself. And be nice. Just because you can. And because it’s catching.


I leave you this Sunday with a photo of my granddaughter, taken a few years ago. Is that a million-dollar smile or what?

 

Cathy Ace: Steps away from the light and comes up aces...

HALLIE EPHRON: I recently had the great pleasure of reading an advance copy of Cathy Ace's THE WRONG BOY. I was bowled over. Engrossing characters, perfectly rendered Welsh setting, a stunning ending, and as with the best books, the title takes on a new meaning when you're done reading.

Today we welcome Cathy today to talk about her amazing new book.

CATHY ACE: A recent review of my latest book The Wrong Boy (by the well-respected Kristopher Zgorski at BOLO Books) began thus:

“With two successful series and a few collections of novellas, some may view Cathy Ace’s decision to release a stand-alone psychological suspense novel as a strange – and potentially risky – move…”

Kristopher was right – I was leaping into the unknown, stepping into the dark…
My Cait Morgan Mysteries have their place firmly in the “traditional” camp; they are contemporary, closed-circle whodunits, with a not-so-amateur professor of criminal psychology as a sleuth. I have never viewed them as “cozy” though they were marketed as such by the publisher, there being “no distinctive way to market them as traditional”; each is set in a different country, with an ever-changing cast of characters save the two main protagonists. My other series, the WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries, is truly “cozy”, featuring a recurring cast, a Welsh village and stately home, and several quirky, and quintessentially British, cases for my four female professional PIs to investigate in each book.

Then along came 2017, when I was faced with two publishers who no longer wanted to do business with me the way they had (a new direction for one, a new owner for the other) so it was clear I had a Big Decision to make – what to write next. Oh, and I should probably mention I also fired my agent. So, I completed my contractual obligations, then plotted my next move…

As a psychology graduate I have always been drawn to the “why” more than merely the “who” or the “how”; Cait Morgan is a professor of criminal psychology who applies her significant understanding of the human condition to the cases she encounters on her travels, and while the four women of the WISE Enquiries Agency aren’t psychologists, they always use their breadth of life-experience and insights to interpret the information they gather through their professional investigating.

So why not run with that? The “why” as the driver for an entire book. But how, exactly?

I began where I always tell those wanting to write to begin – by reading. I read dozens of psychological suspense novels, from the bestsellers to those by authors I’d never heard of before. I met flocks of unreliable narrators (often “girls”!), and became wary of anyone who’d ever sipped so much as a small glass of sherry or sustained even the slightest bump on the head at any point in their life because – you know…blackouts and amnesia, right? I suspect I over-read, because I ended up convinced the “shape” of these books wasn’t right for me as an author.

You see, I had a plot, with the key twists all lined up, but it didn’t feel right; the three main female characters in my head lived their worrying lives in a Welsh location I knew well, but still I couldn’t orchestrate the right rhythm for the tale.

Then I got it!

I’d written a collection of short, and long, stories, as well as a collection of novellas; three of those novellas featured characters from the original collection of short stories, and two of those sets of characters had grown to live their lives in their own series of books. Yes, Cait Morgan and Bud Anderson as well as the four women of the Wise Enquiries Agency were all “born” in the same collection

The real location of THE WRONG BOY: Rhossili, South Wales

of short stories. The only character who’d recurred in my novellas who hadn’t been featured in a novel was a lovely chap by the name of Detective Inspector Evan Glover of the West Glamorgan Police Service in South Wales, who lived an unremarkable, but hard-working and happily-settled life with his psychotherapist wife Betty.

I decided to introduce a police detective element into the shape of the new book to be able to change the rhythm – without allowing it to become a police procedural, which I knew I didn’t want to write. I’d left DI Glover pondering his future as a policeman at the end of the novella I’d written about him in Murder Knows No Season – so decided to give his wife a significant financial windfall, which would allow him to take early retirement.

That meant was I was then able to tell my dark, twisting tale not through the eyes of one unreliable narrator, but through several – each of whom knew a part of what was going on, but none of whom could see the whole picture. I gave each their own point of view, each their own voice – and allowed the reader to see the world in which they lived through their individual lenses, never certain about what was true, or what was assumed or imagined.

Now that the book is written, the characters’ voices aren’t talking in my head anymore – which I’m sure is a good thing. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the process of revealing more and more layers of the psyches of the characters – from Evan and Betty Glover struggling

Village of Rhossili, South Wales

as a couple to come to terms with his retirement, to the many ways in which secrets kept within and between families can be psychologically destructive, and even deadly.

It’s been a journey down a darker, twisting path for me. A risk? Certainly, but the review I mentioned earlier concluded with “The Wrong Boy is a first-class narrative journey and readers should seek it out immediately” which is uplifting, and the book recently hit #1 on the amazon psychological suspense best seller list, which tells me readers like the sound of it enough to take that journey with me. And – especially when we leave our usual paths and take a chance – I believe that’s the best an author can hope for.

Do you choose to follow authors whose work you enjoy when they take a different path?
Does it always work for you? Or them?

Find Cathy at:
http://www.cathyace.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cathy.ace.author
Twitter: @AceCathy

Smitten by Bud Stamper

HALLE EPHRON: I was a child of the movies. I wanted to BE Velvet Brown. I wanted Holly Golightly to be my best friend. And I lusted after Bud Stamper. 

We're talking the early nineteen sixties when I was fourteen years old and obsessed with my shortcomings—too tall, too skinny, pimply, smelly, hairy. It was then, in the throes of self-conscious adolescent angst, that I first clapped eyes on Bud. 

My best friend and I took the bus to the Picwood movie theatre in Westwood to see Splendor in the Grass. I left besotted with Warren Beatty’s character, Bud, a sweet, sensitive, sex-starved high-school quarterback who’s madly in love with the virginal, beautiful, popular, passionate, repressed Deanie (Natalie Wood). 

He (Bud? Warren?) nailed me with those crinkly eyes, that goofy smile, and an endearing boyish awkwardness. He had the perfect inarticulate stammer and aw-shucks manner about him, a sweetened amalgam of Marlon Brando and James Dean. 

If you’re in my generation, I know you saw the movie. If not, here’s what you missed. It’s set in small-town Kansas in 1928 inthe midst of Prohibition and in the run-up to the stock market crash. Bud’s wealthy father, an oil man who’s all bluster and narcissism, wants Bud to go to Yale and join the family business. Bud wants to go to ag school, become a farmer, and marry Deanie. 

Deanie’s not-so-wealthy parents have aspirations for Deanie, too. Her mother is desperate for her to marry Bud. But her mother’s nightmare is that that her daughter will “go too far” and have to have “one of those operations” and end up shamed for life. 

The screen nearly explodes with unfulfilled lust that drives Bud into the arms of Juanita, the girl boys say “knows what it’s all about.” Desperate Deanie tells Bud she’ll do “whatever you want,” but he can’t bring himself to soil her innocence. Which in turn drives Deanie literally around the bend. She tries to kill herself and ends up in a psychiatric hospital.

Bud soldiers on. Following Daddy’s orders, he goes to Yale but flunks out. He marries a waitress and settles down to be rancher on his father’s land, the only bit of his father’s estate that remains intact after the stock market crash. When Deanie, about to be married, comes looking for him, she meet Angelina, a former waitress who’s his sweet pregnant wife, played by the wonderfully slatternly Zohra Lampert. Deanie asks Bud if he’s happy. He answers, “I don’t ask myself that question very often.”

And they go their separate ways.

It’s all very tragic, a morality tale about the power of sex that left me with a great deal to think about. Would I be Deanie or Juanita or Angelina? There are so many tired sexual stereotypes in this movie, but back then I was seriously unwoke. Almost everything I knew about sex was based on Selena in Peyton Place. And now Deanie in Splendor in the Grass.

I followed Warren Beatty’s career, but by the time Bonnie And Clyde came out six years later the bloom was off that rose. According to my movie magazines, my sweet Bud Stamper had been sleeping around. And around. 

It would take a while for me to realize that my ideal partner was not a hunk whom other women lusted after. He was slow but steady, the tortoise not the hare, not clever but smart, loyal…and devoted.

Once upon a time (before you knew better), were you smitten by a rock star? A movie idol? Was it the smile, the eyes, or the abs?