What We're Writing: Hallie in the final lap

HALLIE EPHRON: I’m writing the final fifty pages of a new suspense novel currently titled You’ll Never Know, Dear. At last all the pieces are coming together and the final shoes are dropping. I know who did it (I think), and I know how, and I know why. I just have to write it. 

It’s been a long haul. In the fall of 2013, a friend told me a story about her mother, an aging Southern belle who made porcelain portrait dolls. That became the inspiration for my book’s Miss Sorrel. 

It's the story of a little girl who, along with her favorite doll -- a porcelain portrait doll that her mother made for her -- went missing forty years ago. The book opens with the doll coming back.

  

Here’s a bit from the middle of the opening chapter. Miss Sorrel is the seventy-something-year-old mother and Lis is her forty-something daughter (the sister of the little girl who disappeared). In this opening, Lis and Miss Sorrel are having lunch out on the front porch of their home in South Carolina when a car pulled up in front.

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The car sat there for a few moments, its engine wheezing before it shut down. The woman who climbed out wore sunglasses. She had on tight jeans and a V-neck, flowered T-shirt. With a practiced gesture she tossed back the long dark hair that hung past her shoulders, leaned on the open car door, and gazed across at the house. At Lis and Miss Sorrel watching her from the porch.

 “She’s early, dammit,” Miss Sorrel said under her breath as she levered herself from the chair and waved. “Evelyn’s not even here.” Evelyn Dumont lived in the grand pink house on the corner lot next door. It had wide verandas in front on both floors. Evelyn and Miss Sorrel had been making and repairing dolls together since, well, since before Lis could remember. Both widowed, as they’d aged they’d grown more or less fused at the hip.

“Miss Richards? Hello there,” Miss Sorrel warbled as she gestured to Lis to get rid of the food and dishes. She adjusted the scarf around her neck. “Come right on up.”

The woman, who looked far too unfinished to be Miss anything, reached back into the car. She pulled paper shopping bag from car and a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, straightened, and bumped the door closed with her hip. She tugged down her top which had ridden up, exposing a roll of flesh bunched over her low-riding jeans.

Miss Sorrel’s typical clients were older women who arrived in church clothes, taking special care of their injured or simply aging dolls which were swaddled in blankets or packed in boxes with tissue paper. Not this one, not the way she was swinging that bag, oblivious to the coffee that was dribbling onto it from the cup.

The woman – the getup said eighteen but the face said closing on thirty – climbed the steps to the porch. Lis could tell the moment when her mother could actually see her because that’s when her expression soured from welcoming to eau to manure. And then, because of her excellent breeding, her mother turned up the corners of her mouth in a bright smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

Lis went inside and cleared the kitchen table and sponged it down. Then she lay down a yellow swaddle blanket and a fresh pair of purple latex gloves for her mother to wear when she examined the doll.

Miss Sorrel and Miss Richards came in, followed by Binty. The low-ceilinged kitchen felt claustrophobic as it filled with Miss Richards’s cloyingly sweet perfume smell -- gardenia squared. The girl set the bag on the table and shoved away Binty who was trying to bury its nose in her crotch. Was that a tattoo in the small of her back?  Lis only got a quick peek, but it looked like Harley Davidson eagle wings.

“Darling, would you get my log book?” Miss Sorrel said.

Lis walked through the passageway to her mother’s work room. She flipped the light switch and banks of fluorescent lights that hung low over a pair of worktables tinked to life.  On one table lay an aging hard plastic doll and a can of fixative, its chemical smell still hanging in the air. From a drawer she pulled out the aging theme book in which doll repairs were carefully logged. She also picked up the digital camera they kept in the drawer. Every doll that came into the house was photographed as well as catalogued.

When she brought the items back to the kitchen, Miss Sorrel had opened the bag the woman brought and was peering inside. Her face was so white that the spots of rouge on her cheeks stood out like a clown’s face paint.

           -- Hallie Ephron, from You'll Never Know, Dear

Susan on What We're Writing: "Once More With Feeling"

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: There's good news and there's bad news.

The good news is that I've finished the first round of copyedits on THE QUEEN'S ACCOMPLICE (Maggie Hope #6) and sent everything back to the Powers That Be at Penguin Random House. Also, there's also a gorgeous cover to reveal — but they won't let me show you just yet!

And the bad news — you know all that research I was doing on yet-unnamed Maggie Hope #7? The one set in Paris? And how I'd started writing?

Well, as it turns out, it was a good story. But it wasn't my story. It just didn't work for me.

I have a lot of insomnia and usually curse it — but there, one night in the dark, at about 2 a.m., I realized, "This book is just not working."

And, so, with a heavy heart, I scrapped endless notes and about 30K worth of words.

It hurts, people — it hurts. I mean, yes, it's a so-called first-world problem, of course. But still.... ouch.

However, there's a bright side.

Initially, yes, I was upset. Angry, even. But then, after some time passed, I realized that what I was feeling was ...  relief! Like, my subconscious had known this for a while and it took that long for the message to get through.

At any rate, the news isn't all bad and is in fact (ultimately) good: I've found the right plot now, with the right characters, and have found fantastic first-person research books to read. And so, I'm starting again!

I don't want to give away too much; but, as always, I'm using some real people as inspiration for fictional characters, including Maurice Buckmaster of Special Operations Execute (SOE, Churchill's secret army); Vera Atkins, also of SOE; and then a Frenchman named Henri Déricourt. Déricourt is a polarizing figure — he may have been a double, or maybe even a triple agent — working for SOE, the Gestapo in Paris, and, allegedly also for MI-6. No one agrees.

Questions about Henri Déricourt's loyalty's persist to this day, with historians on different sides of the fence. (Which makes him a fascinating, but difficult, figure to research).

It's important to note that the files that would have shed light on Déricourt and his (allegedly) being a double or even triple agent — burned in a fire at SOE in 1946, the day before they were supposed to be moved to storage.

That fire and all those records it consumed — it's like the burning of the Library at Alexandra for those of us consumed with curiosity about what happened to the SOE agents in France and their betrayal to the Gestapo. Something happened, something horrific. 

But whether it was SOE's incompetence, an SOE double agent working with the Gestapo, or even a triple agent, betraying both SOE and the Gestapo to MI-6 — no one knows. The facts are so obscured now that Anthony Cave Brown reported a historian saying in BODYGUARD OF LIES: "[the disaster that happened to the agents of the SOE Prosper network] is a skein so tangled, so convoluted, attitudes of mind so Byzantine, as ... to defy rational analysis."

And so — unless something turns up, a diary, perhaps or something that was misfiled and thus survived the fire — it will remain a mystery.

Which, Reds and lovely readers, makes a great premise for a novel.

Have you ever put a lot of thought and work and energy into a project, only to realize it's just not working? What happened? How did you work through it? Tell us in the comments!

Tammy Kaehler: What Dolly Parton Taught Me About Being A Feminist

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Happy Friday, everyone! Today I'm thrilled to introduce novelist Tammy Kaehler, the author of the Kate Reilly Racing Mystery Series. I was lucky enough to meet Tammy in person at the Literary Guild of Orange County at Long Beach's Festival of Women authors last year, and we've been buddies every since.

I love Tammy's series, because her protagonist, Kate Reilly, is such a strong and brave heroine — and also because I know absolutely nothing about the world of car racing. It's such a fun glimpse into this specialized world.

Welcome, Tammy!

Tammy Kaehler: Let me start by saying that Dolly Parton was a fixture in my childhood, in that sort of “odd celebrity who’s always there” kind of way—not to mention as the woman with the biggest chest and the most fringe and rhinestones. I was a child of the 80s, so I watched the movie 9 to 5 over and over, knew all the words to Islands in the Stream, and knew her song “I Will Always Love You” long before Whitney Houston recorded it. I just didn’t know how much common sense lurked behind all of that big hair.

From a combination of factors, not the least of which was being raised (mostly) by a single mother who attended UC Berkeley in the 1960s, I grew up believing women should reach for anything they want and not be satisfied with the constraints of traditional female occupations. I attended a liberal arts college, and that’s when I became more aware of language use and gender roles, and all the stuff that “political correctness” (which I think is unfairly maligned) teaches you to recognize.

That’s when I excised the word “girl” from my vocabulary for any female over the age of 16. I learned to say “first-year student” instead of “freshman.” And I developed my habit of always carrying a whistle and never walking alone at night. (Yes, the awakening was the good with the bad.) By then, to me, feminism meant no stereotyping, eschewing historical societal expectations, and doing everything men could. I’d never been a particularly girly girl, and at that point in my life, you wouldn’t have caught me dead in ruffles, bows, pink, or hearts. Somehow, those were marks against feminism or symbols of a need to be protected that would then diminish my strength or power.

Ironically, it was when I went to work for a women’s college that I became more flexible in my idea of what women could be. As I think back, that’s when I started to realize—as I looked around every day at hundreds of women leading or following, excelling or goofing off, and generally filling every role, traditional or otherwise—that just being a woman and doing what I wanted to do was a form of feminism. It’s a sentiment that took a while to gel, and one that I finally articulated in Red Flags when Kate, the racecar driver, is questioned by the media about not doing enough as a role model: “I make a case for women every day I’m behind the wheel,” she says.

A large part of my interest in the racing world stems from meeting women in it who aren’t the beauty-queen trophy girls. The women who don’t trade on their looks for exposure or success. And then someone like Danica Patrick comes along. Whether or not you think she belongs in NASCAR’s highest tier or in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue, she’s in both (or has been). She’s talked about the technical craft of racing, she’s led and won races, and she’s used her sexuality to promote her brand. For a long time I was really conflicted about my opinions of her actions.

And then I started writing Red Flags, creating a character who’s your typical Real Housewife of Beverly Hills, but with a twist: there’s a smart, strategic brain behind the glitz, glam, and pocket dogs. I came to understand that the best thing we as women can do today is be who the hell we want and own it. And who’s the patron saint of that? Dolly Parton.

Because, let me tell you, the woman is no dummy. The first quote of hers I heard and loved was about being called a “dumb blonde.” Her answer: “I’m not offended at all by dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb, and I also know I’m not blonde.” Another that stuck with me—talk about owning it—is one I let my character quote: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” You be you, Dolly.

So while there’s still a part of me that’s still conflicted, I’ve embraced hearts, polka dots, full skirts, and pink. Even pink on a racecar, if it’s driven by a woman and is supporting the fight against breast cancer. (That, by the way, is true of Kate Reilly in my books and Pippa Mann in real life.)

And I’m going to embrace being who I am, on purpose. With kudos to Dolly.

What I want to know is am I the only one with this kind of confusion about what feminism means? Worried, like me, that you’re not doing it right? And be honest, who else out there is a secret Dolly fan?

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Love, love, love Dolly. But it wasn't until the film The Bodyguard and the Whiney Houson version of "I Will Always Love You" that I realized she was also a songwriter and producer. Talk about your triple threat!

Confusion about being a feminist? Reds and lovely readers, what do you think? Do you ever feel like you're "not doing it right"? What about this "lean in" stuff? (And why so much judgment, both from others and our own inner critics?) Please tell us (and meet Tammy) in the comments. 

(And now I can't get "I Will Always Love You" out of my head. THANKS, TAMMY!)

Tammy Kaehler discovered the racing world via a stint in corporate marketing, and she was hooked by the contrast between its top-dollar, high-drama competition and friendly, family atmosphere. Mystery fans and racing insiders alike have praised her award-winning Kate Reilly Racing Mystery Series (Dead Man’s Switch, Braking Points, and Avoidable Contact), and Tammy takes readers back behind the wheel in her fourth entry, Red Flags. She works as a freelance writer in the Los Angeles area, where she lives with her husband and many cars. www.tammykaehler.com