Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

Please join me in welcoming Glen Allison to Mystery Writing is Murder.

A review of The Informationist by Taylor Stevens 
Expectations are a funny thing. And by funny, I mean they are like that dog with the wagging tail that, soon as you look away, bites your ankle. Or, conversely, they can be like the mean-looking mongrel who merely wants a pat on the head.

Example: You read a novel about a woman who goes into dangerous situations throughout the world to gather information. In the process, she is forced to kill people. Not anyone who doesn’t need killing, mind you. When she does it, it happens so fast that she’s on to the next challenger with her knives before the blood from the first one spatters on the wall. And, even though the people deserve it, the slayings stir blood lust in the killer. She fights it, but it’s there.

You can’t help expecting the author of such a story to show signs of inner turmoil. To show it in her eyes, somewhere deep.

But, no. Taylor Stevens, author of The Informationist, is nothing but pleasant here at Bouchercon 2011 in St. Louis. Fans drift to her table in the book signing room, each receiving a smile and kind words from the author. She takes time to encourage a young author who is suffering prepublication jitters. No sharp edges here. Her kindness is genuine.

Not so with her protagonist, Vanessa Michael Munroe, in The Informationist. Oh, Munroe might be smiling. But she is watchful for any preconceived notion on which she can prey. And her knives aren’t far away from her fingertips.

She’ll need them. And you won’t blame her for using them.

“Some people have said it’s gratuitous violence,” says Stevens, “but I say no. She doesn’t seek it out, but it’s always necessary.”

I agree. The story is more than the violence, however. Munroe, a young woman with a tortured past, usually travels the world on info-gathering missions for big business or other organizations. She uses her innate ability to learn languages rapidly to reveal choice nuggets of insight for her clients. In The Informationist, she is presented a different mission: Find out what happened to a missing American teen girl who disappeared while she traveled through Africa four years previously. Many have failed to find out what happened to the girl. Her father wants to know, to rest his mind.

Munroe rejects the offer, at first, shunning the millions in compensation. But that phrase plays in her mind. “Many have failed….” She is hooked. And so are we as readers. And thus begins a tale of one of the toughest – and most beguiling – protagonists I’ve run across in a while.

If you love thrillers featuring a character whose inner battles rival her external challenges, read The Informationist, which came out earlier this year. Her next Munroe novel, The Innocent, comes out at the end of 2011.

What I’ve intentionally left out, until now, is Taylor Stevens’s background: She was raised in a communal apocalyptic cult which took her to four continents, including Africa – where much of The Informationist is set. That experience, and her familiarity with the setting, give this novel an authentic feel and emotional depth that grips the reader.

I stand next to Taylor as we gaze down through the windows of the 22^nd floor of the conference hotel. A reception honoring another author swirls around us. She speaks of her past, neither embracing nor ignoring its reality. “It’s not who I am; it is merely what I experienced.” On one hand, she wishes her novel could receive recognition on its own merits (and it definitely is being recognized). On the other hand, she is practical about how the publicity machine rolls on.

Though I do not press her for the kind of details for which today’s inquiring minds lust, I sense there is much this woman endured as a child as she panhandled along dirty third-world streets. She has spoken of the closed-off nature of the cult, how it has left her, to this day, feeling like an outsider. Earlier in the day, while participating in one of the many author panels, she hushed the crowd by revealing that her education stopped at the sixth grade, and that she didn’t read novels as a teenager. It wasn’t allowed.

Her imagination, however, was not handcuffed. “I sometimes think of a time when I was 19. My privileges had been taken away for some minor offense. I had to go to bed at 8:30 p. m. with the younger children. I woke every morning at 5 a.m., which gave me two hours before reveille at 7. And every morning, for months, I’d walk around the compound for those two hours, just thinking. Just me and my imagination. Nobody could keep me from doing that. That time alone is my happiest memory in the cult, and perhaps paved the way for me to start writing this book over ten years later.”

That kind of persistence in the pursuit of a dream is inspiring for any would-be writer. It drives her protagonist, Munroe, in her mission to discover what happened to the lost girl. And, it has given us one of the best action/suspense novels of the year.

Glen C. Allison is the author of the Forte suspense series of New Orleans.

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Interested in writing reviews?  I’ll be running guest reviews for my Saturday Good Reads  series on Saturdays.  Contact me for details: elizabethspanncraig (at) gmail.com

I came across a fun post from Clarissa Draper yesterday. She mentioned that designing a cover for a WIP can put her in the mood to write it.

I think designing a cover would be an exercise in frustration for me, since I’m graphically-challenged (I picked the ‘minimalist’ blog theme for this blog, for example.) :)

But there are other ways I put myself in the mindset to start a new project:

Put a deadline on my calendar—I have an official deadline (publisher-set) and I have an unofficial one that I shoot for.

Write the back cover copy for the book. Can’t imagine why, but the copywriting department never seems to use my copy! I enjoy writing it, though, and it helps remind me where I’m headed with the plot.

Come up with a title for the book. Even if it’s changed later, it makes the project more real for me if it has a title.

Make an official home for the book on my laptop. I have a folder with the working title of the book. In that folder goes a cast of characters document, a document of brainstormed ideas, and the WIP itself.

Start thinking of it and referring to it as a real book. Even if I’ve only finished the first two paragraphs. Because it is…it’s a book in progress.

How do you make your WIP real? How you put yourself in the mindset to write it?

One interesting blog post that I’ve recently come across was on Cheryl’s Musings, writer Cheryl Reif’s blog.

In the post, Cheryl explains how she decided to start writing. Actually, her story is a lot like my own, which might be why I identified with it. We both enrolled our small children in preschool and started taking our writing seriously.

Cheryl lists some ideas for respecting yourself as a writer, including protecting your writing time and realizing that just because you’re unpublished, it doesn’t mean your writing is unimportant.

I tweeted a link to the post and quite a few people connected to the topic and retweeted it.

One person tweeted back, though, saying that she thought she took her writing too seriously.

I’ve done both, I think. I know the biggest gain in my writing career was when I decided to take my writing seriously. I set an attainable goal, and things started clicking into place.

But I’ve also taken my writing too seriously sometimes. I’ve let deadlines stress me out, I’ve concentrated too much on writing and let other things slide that needed attention in my life.

It looks like, as in so many things in life, that moderation or balance is key.

For me this means making sure I eke out writing time each day (lately it’s been in the 30 minutes in the carpool line outside the high school), but it also means that I put my laptop away when members of my family are trying to have a conversation with me.

I also make sure I plan time in my day for reading (which is both enjoyment and craft-building time for me) and time for connecting online with other writers….the network of writers on blogs and Twitter, etc., who provide so much information and encouragement. But then I make time to play a card game with my kids or talk about the news of the day with my husband.

And…it’s tough. Some days I’m not sure I’m handling the balance at all well. Occasionally I feel distracted, too, when I’m supposed to be focused on what I’m doing at the time. But I’m trying.

How do you balance your time? Do you take your writing seriously? Do you take it too seriously?

Just a quick post today on a discovery I made with my manuscript. One of the revisions I made to my Quilt or Innocence manuscript ended up making a big difference to the plot.

It involved a scene with a particular suspect who was behaving in a suspicious manner. The questions that arose from the scene were: why was the suspect behaving in this manner? What was she trying to hide?

A couple of chapters later, I had an answer for the reader. I showed the sleuth and the reader exactly why the suspect was behaving in that way.

The revealing moment did, actually, also serve to spur some additional questions about the suspect and the suspect’s motive…so it had originally served a purpose.

But I found when I revised the section and delayed answering the question I’d posed in the story, the tension was increased.

When I finally did reveal the answer to the question, the scene had a more climactic feel to it. Plus, I think it will make the reader scramble a little toward the end…so, if that’s true, then this must mean that…

I’ve used this trick before in my writing, but usually for something either really big or a small subplot that I’d woven into the book. But I liked making this change for a medium-sized plot element…because, in doing so, it actually made the plot point bigger and more important.

The only thing to be careful with, if you’re making this change in the revision process and not as you’re writing your draft, is that you clean up any references to the revealed answer in between the question asked and the problem solved. I was surprised how much I’d mentioned it. Still, it’s a pretty easy change to make.

What kinds of questions are you raising in your story? When are you answering them? Can you delay answering them for a bigger effect?

I do think this is a great time to be a writer. We’ve got options and possibilities and an exciting future.

But the publishing industry (including the retail end of things, bookstores) are having a rough time.

My Borders recently closed. And Borders was a bookstore I visited about once a week.

Fortunately, we do still have Barnes and Noble here (our independent bookstores are too far from me). I was there on Saturday evening with my husband and we bought three books.

My membership with Barnes and Noble expires at the end of the month. The associate was explaining the renewal terms to me and I thought, “Uh oh. This isn’t good.”

That’s because they were decreasing the amount of the discount you’d get on a hardcover book from 20% off to 10% off (this is just the regular hardcovers, not the bestsellers, where you still get a substantial discount.)

The associate explained that, since they’d decreased that discount, they were offering renewing customers $25 off Nook Color e-readers and $10 off regular Nooks.

So…basically, they were rewarding readers who want ebooks. The bookstore was, actually, encouraging readers to get ebooks.

I thought about this a little more (and, I’m a Kindle person…I don’t have a Nook.) My teenage son—an avid reader—is one of the reasons I’m at a bookstore once a week. He wants YA books constantly thrown his way (and the library isn’t able to acquire them at the pace they’d like.) I’m buying brand-new hardcover books for him. They are not on the bestseller list, but they’re hot books.

So, the YA books he likes won’t be out in paperback for a while…maybe a year? And the bookstore’s discount has gotten punier for these hardcovers that cost an arm and a leg.

But, on my Kindle, I can immediately purchase these books without driving across town (spending precious and costly gasoline), and at a discounted price. And, unfortunately, without going through Barnes and Noble (since I have a Kindle.)

This worries me a little. Because you know what I’m probably going to do? Buy my son a Kindle. In the long run, we’ll save money and he’ll get all the books he wants. Bottom line, I want him to keep reading and that means supplying him with a steady stream of the books he wants (without going broke.)

But what will happen to the bookstore? And the publishers who aren’t rethinking pricing and formats?

I think we may already be seeing some of that. Publishers Weekly reports that ebook sales for June rose 167% while print declined sharply:

E-book sales rose 167% in June, to $80.2 million, at the 15 houses that reported figures to AAP’s monthly sales report and closed the first half of the year with sales up 161%, to $473.8 million…

…Trade paperback sales had the largest decline, down 64%, while children’s hardcover sales were off 31%. Adult hardcover sales fell 25%, mass market sales were down 22% and children’s paperback was off 13%.

I have several books for sale at the Barnes and Noble, myself. I’d like for the store to keep selling books and I’d like for my publishers to keep thinking of me for projects and putting physical books out. I’d like for them to do well. They’ve been good to me.

But I worry over some of these decisions I see being made—the pricing of different formats (publishers) and fewer discounts for hardcover formats (booksellers.)

What are your thoughts on the ebook revolution and what it means to publishing and book retail? (Again, I think it’s a great time to be a writer and a reader…it’s just the other side of the industry I’m concerned about.)