A Little Confession

A little confession:

I seriously considered giving the advance money back for the last two Sammy Keyes books.

I thought maybe writing more after Sammy Keyes and the Showdown in Sin City would be a mistake.

It has such a beautiful ending.

Really, it could be The End.

And I started wondering, would more be less? How could I write an ending that wrapped the series up better than the ending of Sin City.

What was the purpose?

I talked it over with Mark. I talk everything over with Mark. And he got it, and in a way he agreed. But his advice was to take a little time. He pointed out that I’ve been on a very rigorous deadline schedule. and that the confluence of that and other unrelated but very draining pressures probably just had me exhausted.

Which is true. I try to keep a sunny outlook, but thunderclouds keep storming the castle! Back, you ominous blobs of darkness! Back!

And I have been working very hard to meet my deadlines and NOT SLACK OFF with the writing. It is so important to me that the quality of each Sammy Keyes book is at least as good as, if not better than, the previous one.

I keep raising the bar on myself.

Because I think it’s important!

So…what was the purpose in continuing? If everything’s wrapped up so great at the end of Sin City, shouldn’t I just stop? Who needs a really intriguing final mystery on a cruise ship (my intention for the penultimate book), or to have Sammy…well, I can’t tell you what I’d planned for the last Sammy. I’ll start to cry.

Why not just stop?

I thought about talking to Nancy about it, but didn't. Instead, I went through the motions, hoping I’d get inspired. I did research, came up with a family tree for the cruise ship characters, gave them names, personalities, nailed down the basics of the mystery, conflicts, motives…

And I wrote nothing. Oh, I opened a Word doc and named it Sammy Keyes and the Killer Cruise. I put in the header and wrote Prologue across the first page. But whenever I’d open up the file I'd just stare at it. Or find something to clean. It wasn’t writer’s block. I just wasn’t sure I should write another book.

And then one morning Mark brought me my laptop and said, “Sammy time”. And, I don’t know. After staring at “Prologue” for about five minutes, out of my fingers came:

I look back on things I’ve done and wonder…why didn’t I see that coming?


Why didn’t I know that was a bad idea?


Why didn’t someone warn me?


Grams would tell you she does warn me and that the question should really be, Why don’t I listen?


Which, yeah, I admit, is usually the case.


But not this time. This time I thought it was a bad idea. This time I warned Grams and my mother and Hudson and anyone else who told me it was a good idea that it was a bad idea.


This time they didn’t listen.


Which is how I wound up on a cruise with a dad I barely knew, an endless buffet of party animals, and a family of creepy millionaires.


Happy birthday to me.


And that was all I needed.

To have Sammy appear.

And yes, we've set sail.

See you at the next port!

High-Wheelin' Around Bend

I try to get out for a "jogging tour" of whatever town I happen to be visiting while doing author visits. It's a good way to see the area and helps get you over jet lag, but I'm notorious for getting lost.

In Bakersfield, CA I wound up climbing a fence and getting snagged on top. Stuck snagged. (Yeah, I was channeling Marissa.)

In Fargo, ND I got so turned around and hopelessly disoriented...and couldn't remember the name of the hotel I was staying in. Or the street it was on. All I knew was it was across the street from a Hooters.

I should probably have waited for a female pedestrian to inquire directions, but there was one pedestrian as far as I could see and so I just asked, "Is there a Hooters around here?"

I was desperate and tired and cold (even though I'd been running for an hour and a half), and yeah, he knew which direction to point me.

There was also that spooky bridge to nowhere in some desolate park in Atlanta, and confusion in the vicinity of the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. (Lesson: Never enter the Tabernacle or any of its extensive side buildings in shorts, even to beg directions. People in white will evict you.)

What contributes to my repeated lostedness is that there is no address on a hotel room key card.

There's also no room number.

All for safety, granted, but when you're in a different room / hotel each night the locations and room numbers become a blur. So even when I promise myself I'll remember, even when I say the number aloud, even when I take a mental snapshot of my hallway and its relative position to the EXIT signs, I wind up in tabernacles getting evicted by men in white.

I tried the strategy of a straight line. Go out for, say, twenty minutes, turn around and go back.

But sometimes a road doesn't go along for twenty minutes. Sometimes freeways pop up. Or roads T. Or there's a really cool park with drakes and herons and squirrels just over there.

Squirrel!!

So directions change, roads meander, tabernacles appear (and go on forever), and men in white rebuff my desperate plea for their knowledge.

Being someone who tries to learn from past experience, last week while doing school visits  in Bend, Oregon, I tried a new strategy.

I took a map!

Please. A runner with a map? How embarrassing is that?

Well, obviously you've never asked a man for directions to Hooters or you'd understand--not very!

I didn't have it out and open while running, come on. I had torn it down to the bare necessities, then folded and stashed it in my Race-Ready shorts' pocket.

Unfortunately, after I set out it started snowing. So I really should have been wearing SWEATS, but as bright as I am about all this I went out there in bare legs and froze (because my last pair of sweats was left at the beginning of the last marathon I did for ETRTR).

I did, however, have mittens and a beanie and a fat headband for my ears.

And a map!

I'd intended to go on an out and back with a straight(ish) shot through a park, but I did end up taking two detours. One took me through some scary ice by a river and required me to slip-slide through big 'n' nasty patches of goose poop to get back to being simply snowed upon. The other took me past the High Wheel.

I had no idea what a high wheeler was. And since the snow had, at this point, turned into a weird drizzle of ice-rain, and since I knew where I was and how to get back to my hotel, I could just have blasted past this wheeled wonder, but I actually stopped and read the plaque because I couldn't imagine what this giant thing was or had been used for and wanted to know!

Turns out it was used as logging equipment (before the invention of the diesel engine). A "buncherman" would bunch together felled trees, the "high wheel log skidder" would be placed over the logs, a "gopherman" would dig a tunnel under the logs and snake a chain beneath the logs, and then the front end of the logs would be chained to the long post of the high wheel, so a team of four horses or oxen could pull the high wheel (with the back of the logs skidding) through the forest to a collection area.



This is a picture of it in the springtime!



Okay. Normally I wouldn't stand around in an icy drizzle reading about antique logging equipment, but they had me at Buncherman.

Buncherman!

And then there was Gopherman! How could I not read a plaque that had Buncherman and Gopherman as key characters? They sound like they belong in a Sammy Keyes book, and I spent the rest of my run back to the hotel chuckling to myself about Buncherman and Gopherman. (Well, except for a little break in that mental action when I saw a cool Beatles shirt in a store window and had to check it out.) (Squirrel!) Anyway, what's a little icy rain and goose poop when you've got superhero loggers in capes flying around in your brain? It was a good run, really, all things considered.

And you can bet I'll remember Bend.

Sammy Keyes In Japanese

Thanks for checking in!

I traveled to Texas last week and did a bunch of school presentations, and since the town had chosen Sammy Keyes for a community read (pick any title!), I found myself wishing I'd scanned in the foreign editions of Sammy Keyes and included them in my slide show. Some of the foreign editions are so cool!

So tonight I'm doing just that because I have another group of school visits coming up. And while I was scanning away I thought, wow, of all the people on earth who would love to see these, it's my Sammiacs!

So this week I'll share my favorite with you--Sammy Keyes in Japanese!

Don't you love it? I think Dorito's a hoot, too. I mean, that is one charred Dorito chip, huh?

Receiving foreign editions is one of my tippy-top favorite things about being an author. When I get my copies (I get 5 and I part with them carefully--one for each 'kid', one for me, one for my sister, and one for my awesome in-laws, without whom Sammy may not exist...) I really savor them. Just turn them over and over in my hand and wonder at the art choices and the illustrations. (Yes! Some of them have illustrations! You should see the dangling spider freaking out Marissa in the Spanish version! So funny. )

And the very coolest thing of all?

Looking through the pages of my own story, I can't read a word!

It's awesome!

On the back flap of the Japanese version (well, front, to them) is a picture of me with Japanese characters underneath.

My name!

How do you translate a name like mine?

Only...maybe it's not really my name. Maybe it says something else.

Maybe it's all a big joke on me!

Translation: "Woman from USA who thinks she's hot."

Crack me up!

Anyway, I'm sharing this awesome cover with you now. Sorry I didn't think of it sooner.

And to catch you up, I've been working manically! I re-re-re-re-wrote Justice Jack (final stages!) and am sweating through a rewrite of Sin City...both of which landed on my desk days apart and interrupted me from plotting #17 which my husband is calling Killer Cruise, even though there are no deaths!

But one may turn up, right? It's a Sammy Keyes book! Anchors away!

Plus, the name is awesome.

So yeah. We'll call that the working title even though it's sure to change. (But if you've been with me any length of time, you already knew that!)

And now, back to scanning for me. Miles and miles to go before I sleep...

PS Comments on comments on previous postings will be coming! Thanks for your patience.

Who Do You See As Sammy Keyes?

Thanks for checking in! Here as promised is the paperback cover for Sammy Keyes and the Power of Justice Jack. I LOVE this cover! I think it's a perfect capture of Justice Jack, and I think it's so Rolling Stone, the way the artwork overlaps the KEYES. My favorite paperback cover so far!

So you regular followers have now been privy to both the hardcover and the paperback artwork...and the book's not even out yet! The hardcover is slated for May 2012 and the paperback? I think it's due out in November. But the thinking ahead, working ahead, planning ahead is all necessary if we're going to stick to our schedule and have things done right.

So along those thinking-ahead lines, I've decided that you are the group to ask the BIG question:

What actress do you see as being the best screen version of Sammy Keyes?

As you know, I've been quite hesitant about this whole Sammy to TV prospect. But there is a well-established producer who is an actual fan of Sammy's (as in he's--gasp--read the books and loves her), and has been steadfastly keeping tabs with me over the years,  hoping something would eventually work out.

What became of paramount importance to me (after a sobering reality check involving what optioning 'a property' [the Sammy books] really meant) was the integrity and quality completion of the book series. Sure it's nice to have Hollywood people interested in developing your books to film, but allowing them to do so is a crap shoot. Maybe it'll come out great and help the books...maybe it will be awful and create an unshakable association.

But, once again, I met with this producer, and, once again, I came away more positively inclined about his potential care and handling of Sammy Keyes as a TV series.

He always asks me who I see as various characters, and, honestly? Sammy is the Sammy in my head, and there's nobody who could fill that image 100%  Besides, I don't follow the industry. I don't know who's who, so I would LOVE your input / help.

Let's start by my telling you that the producer likes Bailee Madison and thinks in a couple of years (which is how long these things take, at a minimum) she would make a great Sammy. So what do you think? Who do you like? Not just for Sammy, but for any / all of these main characters:

Sammy:

Casey

Grams:

Hudson
Heather:
Billy!:
Marissa:
Holly:
Dot:

Lana:

Warren:

Others?

Just copy the list, paste it in a comment, and write in your vote for any or all of them. I will check them out and pass them along. Thinking caps, people! If we want this to develop in a direction we like, we've got to give input while they're soliciting it.

Thanks for your comments, thoughts, and input!

Hot Pink Trailer

Yes, it's true.

I lived in a hot pink trailer.

It was, as my brother would have said, "Funky-do."

And not actually hot pink, that's just what Robin and Ben, the friends who let me live in it, affectionately called it. But it was pink with black accents and if I remember correctly, cool black and white diamond linoleum.

It was long and narrow and boxy and had it's own unique smell, but there was something uber cool about it. Definitely "vintage," but, more importantly, a place for me to stay.  It was parked in the back of my friends' large, sandy lot, behind their house and amidst eucalyptus trees, and if I could use only one word to describe how I felt living in a funky-do (not-so hot) pink trailer, it would be grateful.

The challenge at the end of each of the previous posts has been to identify in which book the place (or in the case of Max, the concept) wound up. This week I'll have to tell you which book the hot pink trailer appears in because it hasn't been published yet--it's in Sammy Keyes and the Power of Justice Jack. And because I'm a big believer and remembering the people who have helped me through my life, the dedication in Justice Jack will be to Robin & Ben.

Now, if you've read the previous posts about my nightmarish living experiences, you'll recognize that this one doesn't quite fit the mold. A funky-do trailer does not measure up to dangling black widows or psycho landlords, and I would never dream of dedicating a book to someone like Max. But this brings me to the reason behind telling you these stories about places I've lived.

In writing, place can be as much a character as the people in your story. I know that many of you aspire to be published, and, as you almost certainly already know, being a writer can make for scrappy living. So what I want to encourage you with this week is the reality that hard times (and funky-do landlords and living quarters) will give you much  more to work with as far as setting and character than a smooth, easy life or a swanky apartment where the toilet always flushes and you've never had to wield a plunger or patch the roof or smash a black widow spider.

Or, for that matter, escape a man who thought you were his long lost Athena.

So if you're someone who's going through a tough time, chin up! Just think of all the material you're collecting! There are so many things in my books that come from life off the smooth lane. And they include so many things I know how to do because I had to figure them out or do them to 'survive'. Many I cursed or hated or asked myself why me?  But now that I have survived I have those real life experiences (and funky-do places) to draw from. Sammy is Sammy because I didn't lead a smooth-lane life. Scary times, hard times, strange people, scrapes with the law...all of it gives you character which can't help but transfer into your characters.

So take notes. Take pictures. Remember the smells and the sounds and the pain. Get through the dark days of your life and then use them to make your own light.

It's the only way you can look back and smile.