On Life, Love and Loss - A Reality Check

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

As writers our job is to create emotions and reactions to those emotions, be it a love story or a murder mystery or whatever. Sometimes we get so used to playing God, creating and manipulating those emotions and reactions in the way we want, that when real emotions from real situations hit us we are blindsided and overwhelmed.

2018 has not been a good year. As you probably know, this spring my long-time, beloved cover artist Dawn Charles was found dead in her apartment. While devastating, her passing was a grief but not really surprising. Her health had been iffy for years, and sometimes it seemed she spent as much time in the hospital as out. Still, we did about 20 book covers together, emailed or chatted on the phone at least once a fortnight - and more often than not a couple of times a week. Though we never met in person, she was closer and more dear to me than a lot of people with whom I share DNA.

Then last week I received the shattering news that Dr. Dirk Huyge had died suddenly and unexpectedly.  Curator of the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels and Director of the Belgian Archaeological Mission to Elkab, Dirk and I had met online when I was casting about for help on information on the Elkab necropolis for THE EGYPTIAN FILE. We became friends, and after a while he thought that I do a book about the dig house at Elkab, which is widely believed to be haunted by the ghost of its builder, Somers Clarke. I thought he was joking, but as time progressed he suggested that The Husband and I come to stay for a while in the dig house - a thing that civilians never get to do.

I wanted to, I really really wanted to, but we had been traveling a lot and The Husband was on one of his periodic 'we're spending too much and we have to cut down on expenses' kicks. I don't give up easily, though, so after telling Dirk I would see I sat and thought for several hours. marshalling every argument I could think of about why this would be a good thing. By the time The Husband came home I had a huge and cogent presentation ready. He walked in the door and I started in - 'Darling, Dirk has asked us to come stay at the dig house and I think...'

That was the end of it. He looked at me and said, 'Sounds great. When do we go?'

Now it is a long and expensive way from Dallas to Luxor to Elkab, especially for less than a week, so The Husband I decided to make a real holiday of it. We contacted Jane Akshar, who rents luxurious holiday flats on the west bank of Luxor for what to American eyes is a ridiculously low rent, and arranged to stay with her. I met Jane online at the same time I met Dirk, and she too has become a dear and beloved friend (as well as a gifted and creative webmistress for my website) as well as my go-to reference about the minutiae of being in Egypt.

Dirk invited us in the middle of January; on March 15th we boarded the plane for Egypt. We didn't get to stay as long as we liked at the dig house (don't know how long that would be - I'd like to be there still) but the house is not all that large when a full dig crew is in residence, and we had to be sandwiched in between the visits of our dear friend Salima Ikram and a film crew from the BBC. And in order for us (non-professionals in the field of Egyptology) to come to the dig at all Dirk had to work his way through several layers of mind-boggling Egyptian bureaucracy to get us permission to stay. The Egyptians are very protective of their antiquities, and as a consequence very few civilians get to see archaeology from a dig house perspective.

When the day came for us to leave Luxor for Elkab, we had agreed to call Dirk on the way to the train station and he would come get us, as we would never be able to find the dig house on our own. He was right about that; to reach the dig house involved a long drive through a road-less wasteland populated with a few mean little huts, a couple of dead cattle and two enormous cemeteries.

But that was to come. We called Dirk from the pre-arranged spot on the road, and just as we pulled into the train station a big old and sort of battered Land Rover pulled in beside us. Out of it stepped a tall, ruggedly handsome man of a mature age (think an older Indiana Jones type) who started walking toward me. 'Susan?' he asked. 'Dirk?' I replied. Then he swept me into an extravagant, MGM type of embrace.

Now make no mistake and don't misconstrue this story - Dirk was married to a lovely woman whom he absolutely adored. I am more happily married than most to the most wonderful man in the world - and he was standing not ten feet away from us. But... that enthusiastic hug in the dusty parking lot of a small-town train station in Egypt is STILL one of the most romantic moments in my lifetime, and I will always remember it fondly.

Our stay at Elkab was magical and much much too short. The crew was welcoming, helpful and a great deal of fun. After we went home Dirk and I stayed in contact by email - not as much as perhaps we should have been, but then we had no idea that time was so short. We had begun to play with the idea of doing a mystery with him as the sleuth - but only after he retired. We had talked about it when A KILLING AT EL KAB was in the inception stages, but I didn't want to risk casting any kind of a shadow on his excellent reputation as an archaeologist and a scholar... but I did want him in the book. So, he became the only 'real' person featured in the book, but only in two quick appearances. Now the Dirk-as-sleuth idea in a future book is permanently retired, as I couldn't do it without him.

One final, bittersweet note. On Sunday I received a sweet email from Dirk's wife, telling me how much he enjoyed A KILLING AT EL KAB and asking permission to use my description of him in the book at his memorial service. I don't mind telling you that made me weep, and of course I gave my permission. Her request is a lovely tribute to both of us.

We always think we will do whatever-it-is tomorrow, but sometimes it is brought forcibly on us that we are never guaranteed a tomorrow. So - embrace your friends, tell you family that you love them, do what is important to you today. Sometimes there is no tomorrow.

RIP, Dawn Charles.

RIP, Dr. Dirk Huyge.

The world is poorer for your absence.

Decisions, Decisions… And AN ANNOUNCEMENT!

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

I’m not good at decisions. The way I dither over a menu when we eat out drives The Husband absolutely wild. Neither do I like doing publicity – for myself; I used to be in the advertising industry and am very good at it – for other people. Like? I loathe doing publicity, either for myself or for others. I was raised in a time and a place and a family that believed blowing one’s own horn was both vulgar and classless.

However… with the world the way it is and – more importantly – with my assistant (also known as The Husband) and my webmistress (the talented and irreplaceable Jane Akshar) suggesting (i.e., demanding) I become more involved with the rest of the world, I have caved in and decided to do a newsletter. (There will be a button on my website in a few days where everyone can subscribe, or just let me know and I’ll have one of them add you manually.)

Believing in research, I immediately subscribed to a big bunch of authors’ newsletters at random – and was absolutely astonished. I always thought newsletters were for important news, or at the most a monthly affair where the author could keep in touch with their fans. Apparently I was very wrong, for very many of these authors think nothing of sending out ‘newsletters’ or ‘friendly contacts’ or ‘updates’ as often as 3-4 times a week, often flogging the same book over and over!

My Lord, how can anyone think of so much to say about themselves and their work? (To tell the truth, most of it was kind of boring…) And so much of it was about giving away their books. While I recognize the occasional freebie campaign is an accepted marketing tool, isn’t that much freebie giveaway contraindicative to the concept of being a professional writer?

And most of all, how do they find the time to do all that and still have time to write?

I don’t get it.

So – if you do decide to subscribe to my newsletter (and I hope you do) please be assured that I won’t stuff your email box. I intend to send one only when it contains something truly newsworthy – a new novel release, for example, or a major event.

For example – if I had my newsletter already up and running, I would very happily publicize this :

On December 14, the Boekhandel De Kleine Johannes (which in my nearly non-existant Dutch/German means Dear John Bookseller – if different, please let me know) in Louvain, the university town of Belgium, is having a literary evening featuring my dear friend Dr. Dirk Huyge, Director of the Belgian Archaeological Mission to El Kab and Curator of Prehistoric and Early Dynastic Egypt at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels. Dirk will be talking mostly about his work as an archeologist in Egypt but also about how he became a character in my traditional Janis Patterson mystery A KILLING AT EL KAB. I am even invited to participate by Skype! (The Husband and I even looked into going over so we could attend the event, but it was just impossible, both financially and scheduling-wise.)

Yes, I will mention this again in my newsletter! When it comes out.

Just To Be Sure...

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

At long last it’s here. The release day of your new book. The cover is gorgeous, the print PDF and the electronic versions are pristine. All the editing passes and revisions are finally over with and each sentence has been polished until all of them shine like diamonds. You’ve got your excerpts ready for publicity, the various sizes of your cover are waiting to be posted, you’ve done your keywords and metadata for release… all that awaits is for you to push the ‘Publish’ button.

And your finger hovers hesitantly over your mouse as you frantically search your mind and your manuscript for anything you might have forgotten. Stress brings a sheen of perspiration to your forehead as your clicking finger starts to tremble. Remember the old saw “Horses sweat, men perspire and ladies glow”? Well, just about now I always start to glow like a horse.

This is it. This is what you’ve been working for for so long. But is your precious book ready? Really ready? Maybe just one more check… just to be sure?

Believe me, you can ‘just one more check’ yourself into total stasis. I know. I’ve done it. Especially when the book is a very important one.

You see, that’s where I am right now. One year ago this month The Husband and I started out for Egypt, where we had been invited to stay at an archaeological dig house. The excavation director is a very dear friend and had suggested I might want to set a murder mystery in this lovely old house built in 1906 by an English Egyptologist named Somers Clarke that is now the excavation headquarters. Of course we went and though we have been to Egypt several times it was just about the most magical trip of my life.

The resultant book is A KILLING AT EL KAB, and it’s going to be released in the middle of this month – almost to the day we arrived at El Kab. As I am an avowed Egyptomane, this is one of the most important books of my entire life.

And I want it perfect. I have driven both my cover artist and formatter almost to madness with my pickiness and these last few weeks The Husband has been positively grateful to escape to his job every morning. I have been through the manuscript and the various formatted copies so many times that I can recount great chunks of copy from memory. Yet still I hesitate to hit the ‘publish’ button. I tell myself it’s because I haven’t yet received the paperback proofs.

Yeah.

More likely it’s because I know that somewhere deep in the manuscript there lingers a malign typo, waiting in hiding until the book is available to the world before it makes itself known…

Maybe I should go through the book again… Just to be sure.

A Matter of Perception

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

The cold season is starting to set in. In my part of the country that means the temps are dropping into the 50s and 60s during the night and the 60s and 70s during the day. Love it! I know that later on we will probably have some ice and maybe a day or two’s worth of snow, but that’s all. We will have some cold weather, just enough so I can enjoy wearing my furs, and that will be refreshing after a summer of the sky constantly being on ‘broil.’

Still, that’s what we’re used to and we live with it. I think it’s all just what we get used to. In September The Husband and I went to Massachusetts to attend a friend’s wedding. It was beautiful even though the leaves had not yet started to turn. The temperatures were ideal. I rhapsodized about them, enjoying them and telling our friend that they were just perfect, as we had left temperatures still hovering around 100 at home. He laughed and agreed, but then said that for most of the winter there would be real cold and lots of snow – like he had 8 feet in his yard last winter.

Eight feet! That’s as tall as our ceilings at home. No, thank you. I cannot see how anyone could exist in such conditions, let alone choose to stay in them. But that’s just me… our friend and his new bride just love it there, so I wish them and anyone who else who likes it joy. Just don’t expect me to come visiting during the winter!

On the other hand, when The Husband and I were in Egypt in January of 2010, I was startled to see coats and sweaters and boots that looked like Arctic gear in a number of Cairo shops. I was even more startled when, later that same trip we were in the Valley of the Kings – half the country south of Cairo. I was wearing a short sleeve polo shirt, lightweight jeans, hiking boots, a sun hat and one of those sleeveless, multi-pocketed photographer’s vests – open, I might add. It was a very comfortable outfit and I was only sweating a little bit. I walked around a corner and literally bumped into a local man.

We stared at each other and I don’t know which of us was the more startled. He had on heavy jeans, boots, a shirt, a sweater and over all that a fur-trimmed parka. He was not sweating. Neither of us said anything, just kept staring as if at some strange alien species while we circled around each other enough to continue on our individual ways.

The point of this little weather report is that it all comes down to perception, and perception controls our writing. Whatever we write – sweet romance, erotica, mysteries, horror, whatever – there are some who are going to say ‘Ooh, how can you write that stuff?’ or ‘It’s all I ever read.’ What is important is not so much what genre you write, but which readers you reach. No one kind of book is going to please all readers, just like no one climate is going to please everyone. To try is kind of foolish, don’t you think?

Genre-bending is regarded by some as a way to try and reach more readers. Maybe it is, but if trying to expand your readership is the only reason you have a cowboy in a space ship having a romance with an alien fairy your story is going to be forced and flat. If having that cowboy in a space ship having a romance with an alien fairy is your story, the essence of why your story exists, go for it.

And that’s the important thing – the integrity of your story. One of the constants is that no story is going to be liked/read by everyone. You cannot please everyone, so you should only be concerned with being true to your story. Metaphorically, snow or sun, ocean or mountains, your story should be your prime concern. Write your story and let the readers come – don’t chase them. 

The Difficulty of Thinking Short

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

One of the first things I hear when people learn that I’m a novelist is “Where do you get your ideas?” Well, duh! The world is full of ideas. I’ve said that many times. Also that a book takes many ideas, but the good thing is that ideas feed off each other. There’s another thing I hear a lot – “How do you write so many words?” That one doesn’t even deserve an answer. Also, “How do you know how many words you’ll need?” Easy answer : As many as it takes to tell the story. (Unless you’re writing for a publisher with strict word-count requirements; I don’t, so that doesn’t enter into my equation.) One of the best analogies of short story vs novel is a short story is drawing a tiny miniature; a novel is painting a mural on the side of a building.

Back to the subject of this blog. I really believe the world is brimming with ideas for books. Where I have trouble – and this is a difficult admission for me to make – is with the short stuff. I had sold two novels to major publishers before I sold a short story. (I am exempting short, factual, business pieces done for my various jobs – they are another animal entirely!) I still am uncomfortable with the short story format, and can generally write half a novel in the same time it takes to get a short story (1) short enough and (2) in a decent enough shape to submit. Some of us just can’t do small! One time a nice lady who was letting me guest blog said in an effort to be reassuring, “Don’t worry – all you’ll need is 350 words or so.” I told her that there were some days I couldn’t say ‘good morning’ in just 350 words! My trip diary from our time in Egypt this March is creeping towards 30,000 words.

A memory – years ago, when I was editor in chief of a multi-magazine publishing house, we were running a special feature for Mother’s Day. Local celebrities were invited to write 250 words or so about their mothers. The idea took hold so that everyone answered, including a few who hadn’t been asked but had heard about it and wanted their mothers included. We decided to use them all (the ones that were marginally literate, that is) but that sent our page count up. In magazines you have to go up four pages at a time, and we had enough to fill three. The ad manager said she’d send the salesmen out again to see if she could drum up some sales. I said I’d write something about my mother – who, incidentally, threatened me with disinheritance if I wrote a word about her. I said we had at least a quarter page to fill, which is a fairly large amount. (All our magazines were tabloid-sized.) She suggested I write about my great-grandmother who came with her husband to the US as a bond servant, and after their time was served were early pioneers of Texas. She lost her husband not long after they came to Texas and was left with a farm and six children under 10. Mother gave me the facts and dates, but said she didn’t know how I would expand that to fill a quarter page.

Well, I started to write and before you know it, I had a full page of copy. One entire page! (Told you I couldn’t write short!) I called the publisher and the ad manager and told them to call off the salesmen. The publisher wasn’t quite sure about this until she read the piece, then she called the layout artist and had this story put on page 3 – the prime spot in the magazines. That story won an award, and that issue was the only one in the magazine’s history that I knew about which sold out entirely. So much for short…

The worst part of short for me, however, is blogging, especially when you blog regularly. My great fear is boring people. I honestly don’t know how people who have their own blogs do it. Unless you’re publicizing a new release, it’s hard to come up with things to say on a regular basis. If you do have a new book out, it’s easy – just talk about it, about how you wrote it, about how it ties in with your other books, about how you came up with the characters, and so on and so on and so on. The only thing is, you can only do that so long before people get bored with a continuing commercial and might start skipping your blog, so why bother having one? Last year, when I was releasing a spate of backlist books (one every two weeks from June 1 to October 31) I was in hog heaven – readymade copy fodder, all different books with different backstories, just waiting for me. Now, though…

I can always do a fluff piece like this one, but don’t know how interesting it is to others. I don’t like to blog about my personal life outside the writing sphere. I probably could, but would be very hesitant about doing a craft or a how-to piece – after all, I’m neither rich nor famous in the writing field. Heck, I’m not even middlin’ or infamous! My books don’t grace the bestseller lists. My royalties have a pathetic lack of multiple zeroes in the final amount. How could I be so arrogant as to try to teach others?

So I will just keep writing novels, putting one word after another, and searching desperately for blog fodder that won’t drive people away. I do warn you, though – whatever they’re about, they won’t be short!