Outliners Take Note--Don't Call Me a Pantser!

NOTE: I'm pleased today to welcome Elizabeth Zelvin as a guest blogger. Liz is, she says, a semi-dormant SleuthSayer ("Like writers in general, we never retire"), and she's the author of the Bruce Kohler mystery series: five novels and five stories published, plus two additional stories accepted for publication. Her short stories have been nominated twice for the Derringer and three times for the Agatha Award. Other publications include two historical novels, two books of poetry, an album of original songs, and a book on gender and addictions. Liz lives in New York City and can be found online at http://elizabethzelvin.com, on Facebook at http://elizabethzelvin.com and on Amazon. Good to have you here, Liz!--John Floyd

Having completed the first draft of a new short story and feeling mighty good about it, I got to thinking about my personal creative process, with which I've become fairly well acquainted over the years. I call myself an into-the-mist writer, because when I sit down to tell a story--we're talking fiction here, whether long or short--I can see only a little way ahead of me. I have to peer into the dimness to see my way, and what comes beyond the limited compass of my headlights is a mystery. In fact, it's an act of faith to trust that there's something there, and believe me, I have many moments of doubt.

The image that comes to me when I say the words "into the mist" is a drive I once took along the Blue Ridge Parkway on a foggy summer morning. My husband was with me, but he is a New Yorker born and bred who came to cars late in life, and at the time, I was still the family's only driver. There was supposed to be a scenic view of mountains off to the side, but we literally saw only the gray wedge in our low beams, which revealed swirls of mist, a hint of the winding road, and once a doe escorting a couple of fawns.

That's what writing the first draft of a story or a novel is like for me. I can see a glimpse of where I need to go next. I have a few ideas--like notes in a guide book--of features that may show up along the way ahead. But I'm never sure that I'll get where I'm supposed to be until I get there. When I do, there's no mistaking it. It's my destination, all right. I heave a big sigh of relief--and buckle down to the much easier business of killing my darlings and cleaning up the mess.

I've tried to write the other way: planning in advance, laying it all out neatly. It doesn't work. My creative process starts with my characters talking in my head. (Well, my husband says it starts with "I can't"--but after that.) Anyhow, I can't plan the jabber of those unruly characters. I'm not in the driver's seat. Bruce's wisecracks and Barbara's enthusiasm are a gift from the muse or whatever you want to call it. It happens, and it's the best feeling in the world. All I can do is make a beeline for my laptop or my Post-its or the voice recorder on my iPhone, whatever's handy, and start writing down what they say.

Once my characters start talking to each other, their conversation shapes the course of the narrative, even if I know in a general way where the story is going to end up. My series characters all have strong personalities, and it doesn't take much for them to start talking and acting exactly like themselves. The secondary characters in a particular story spring up as needed. They become my suspects and witnesses and law enforcement folks with their own personalities and ways of reacting to the situations I put them in and the characters they meet. They only come to life because I don't try to stuff them into some preset mold.

One of my favorite true stories from my historical novel about Columbus's voyage in 1493 is how one of the Spanish priests who accompanied the expedition went around Hispaniola collecting what he called folktales from the Taino, the indigenous people. When he got back to Spain, he published a collection of these tales. Like most authors, he was very proud of his book. These simple people have such charming folktales, he said. What a pity that they have no religion! The point, of course, is that the Taino were telling him about their religion all along.

That's kind of the way I feel when writers whose creative process involves outlining call writers like me "pantsers," a term that I consider demeaning. Who are they to dismiss my creative process as "flying by the seat of my pants"? It's my process, and believe me, there are no pants involved--no recklessness or lack of thought, merely an equally valid and effective way of summoning creativity, however different from theirs. So don't call me a pantser!

Taxonomy Lesson

Hey folks...  the Short Mystery Fiction Society announced the finalists for the 2016 Derringer Awards yesterday and fully 25% of the stories are by SleuthSayers!  John Floyd scored in two categories.  Barb Goffman, Elizabeth Zelvin, and I settled for one each.  Congratulations to all the finalists!

Back in November I had the chance to speak at the university where I work about my novel Greenfellas. The good folks there have put a video of my talk on the web, which reminded me of something I wanted to discuss about it.

I guessed correctly that a lot of people in the audience would not be mystery fans and since this is an educational institution, I figured I should educate them a little on the field.  When you ask someone not familiar with the genre to think about mysteries they tend to conjure up Agatha-Christie style whodunits so I explained that there are also hardboiled, police procedurals, inverted detective stories, noir, caper, and so on.

All of which is fine and dandy.  But in the Q&A someone asked me what types of mysteries I particularly enjoyed.  I happened to mention Elmore Leonard - and then I was stumped as the thought ran through my head:  What type of mystery did Elmore Leonard write?

Well, you could say, he wrote Elmore Leonard novels.  That's not as silly as it sounds.  He wrote a novel called Touch, about a man who acquired the ability to heal people by touching them.  At first publishers didn't want it because it was not a crime novel, but by 1987 they were willing to take a chance on it because it was an Elmore Leonard novel, and readers knew what that meant.

The subject was also on my mind because I had recently read Ace Atkins novel The Redeemers, which struck me as being very much in Leonard's territory.  (That's a compliment to Atkins, by the way.) And I can't exactly say he is writing Elmore Leonard novels.

So, what am I talking about?  A third person narration story from multiple points of view, and most of those characters are criminals, each of whom has a nefarious scheme going.  The main character might be a good guy or just a slightly-less-bad guy.

You know I love quotations, so here is one from Mr. Leonard: "I don’t think of my bad guys as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and they wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank."

Is there a name for this category of book?  Crime novel is useless.  Suspense doesn't really cut it.

You could argue that my book Greenfellas falls into that category, but I don't think it does.  First of all, it's a comic crime novel.  It's an organized crime novel, about the Mafia.  (Leonard's characters tend to be disorganized crime.)  And - I have harder time explaining this one - to me it's a criminal's Pilgrim's Progress, concentrating on one bad guy as he goes through a life-changing crisis.

So that's three category names for my novel.  But I'm still thinking about Leonard's.

What's a nice Jewish girl doing in the Sultan's harem?

It's not what you think!

When young marrano sailor Diego Mendoza boarded Admiral Columbus's flagship, I didn't know his voyage of discovery, which began on the very day the Jews were expelled from Spain, would lead me—and Diego's sister Rachel, a character who didn't even exist yet—to the harem of Sultan Bayezid II in Istanbul, at the heart of the Ottoman Empire.

Diego appeared inside my head in the middle of the night, as our best fictional creations do, and nagged me until I wrote "The Green Cross," a mystery short story set aboard the Santa Maria that was published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and nominated for an Agatha Award. One thing led to another . . .

In my novel, Voyage of Strangers, about Columbus's second voyage, I accounted for Diego's parents by saying they had fled to Firenze (Florence), whose de facto ruler, Lorenzo di Medici, was known for his tolerance toward the Jews. Rachel, who had remained in Spain, escaped the Inquisition by wangling her way onto the Admiral's ship and participating in the events of 1493 to 1495 in Hispaniola, which included the tragic destruction of the Taino people. At the end of Voyage, Diego, Rachel, and their friend Hutia, a Taino survivor, are sailing back to Europe to embark on a search for their family.

Once I started researching events after 1492, I realized that the Mendozas were in trouble, and so was I. We all had to be resilient if we wanted to survive. Here are some of the historical events that shaped my new novel, Journey of Strangers, (just out in e-book and paperback):

1492: Lorenzo di Medici died, making Firenze less of a haven for the Jews.
1493: 120,000 Spanish Jews fled to Portugal. Eight months after offering them refuge, the King of Portugal changed his mind. He abducted two thousand Jewish children, forcibly baptized them, and sent them as slaves to São Tomé, a pestilential island off the coast of West Africa.
1494: King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy, claiming the throne of Naples and occupying Firenze along the way. The Medici had to flee, and so did the Jews.

The harem! you say. What about the harem? I'm getting there . . . War-torn Italy and the pirate-infested Mediterranean were dangerous even to Christian townsmen, villagers, and travelers and even more so to the Jews, who tended to get scapegoated in any crisis. The Ottoman Empire offered a haven. Sultan Bayezid extended an invitation to Jewish merchants, scholars, artisans, and physicians, seeing them as potential assets to the Empire. And that's how so many Sephardic Jews ended up in Istanbul and other Ottoman cities.

By the time Rachel reaches Istanbul, she's added a wealth of remarkable experiences to her native charm and ingenuity. She wants a life that offers more than being married off to some nice Jewish boy, keeping his house, and bearing his children. For one thing, she's in love with Hutia, who plans to convert to Judaism so her parents will consent to their marriage. The rabbis may have something to say about that. In the meantime, Rachel learns, as I did, that the purveyors of goods and services to the women sequestered in the Sultan's harem were Jewish women known as kiras, a word derived from the Greek for "lady." The kiras were the harem's conduit of communication to and from the outside world. In the course of becoming a kira, Rachel gets to know the Sultan's women, the hatuns (Turkish for "lady"), and has some difficulty steering clear of their intrigues.

Let me tell you some things I bet you didn't know about the harem. I didn't either. I didn't come across Leslie P. Peirce's brilliant book, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, which is by far the best source of information on the Ottoman women, until later. So not all of these details appear in Journey of Strangers. Oops. I apologized in the Afterword.

• By the late 15th century, the Ottoman Sultans were not taking wives from neighboring Turkish princely houses but choosing slave women as their concubines and not marrying them. This freed them from the potential problem of ambitious in-laws. (Twenty years later, Suleiman the Magnificent broke tradition by marrying the concubine Hürrem, whom you may have heard of as Roxelana, but that was the exception. She'll appear in my next book.)

• A woman who bore the Sultan a son gained enormous prestige and position. As a young man, he would be given a province to govern. His mother went with him and in some cases played a role in the governing of the province. If her son became Sultan in turn, she won the jackpot of power, wealth, and influence. If he did not, he would probably be strangled or beheaded so the new Sultan would not have to worry about rivals, and his mother became a nobody.

• It was the custom for the Sultan to keep his current favorite as a bedmate only until she bore him one son. Then their sexual relationship ended. From then on, she was defined by her role of mother to a prince. (Again, Hürrem was the exception.) If she had a daughter and the Sultan still desired her, she could try again. Each mother conspiring on behalf of multiple sons would have created intrigues of intolerable complexity. So they weren't given the chance.

• The harem was not in any sense a bordello. It was the Sultan's household, his home, the quarters of the female members of his family according to Islamic law. Besides his concubines (past, present, and future), the harem included his daughters and sisters and their many attendants, as well as his mother. Each of them received a daily stipend. One source of Peirce's myth-busting scholarship was the harem's household accounts from the 16th century on.

I could go on. Did you know that not only the janissaries but also the viziers and other palace officials were all the Sultan's personal slaves? The Sultan would marry off his sisters and daughters to these high-ranking damads (slave sons-in-law) to ensure double loyalty. Hmm, this isn't really about sex at all, is it? Maybe the title should have been "How the Sultan made sure he didn't have any trouble with his in-laws."

---

Elizabeth Zelvin is a former SleuthSayer and author of the Bruce Kohler mystery series and the historical novels Voyage of Strangers and Journey of Strangers. Her short stories have appeared in EQMM and AHMM, been nominated for the Agatha and Derringer Awards, and listed in Best American Mystery Stories 2014. Her most recent releases are a new e-edition of the entire Bruce Kohler series and Breaches & Betrayals: Collected Stories. Liz is a New York psychotherapist who practices online, a poet, and a singer-songwriter whose album is titled Outrageous Older Woman. You can learn more at www.elizabethzelvin.com, friend her on Facebook at Facebook.com/elizabeth.zelvin, and find her work on Amazon's Elizabeth Zelvin Page.

A Quick Visit to the Renaissance

by Elizabeth Zelvin

One of the many advantages of living in the Big Apple is access to some of the great museums, and thus some of the great art, of the world. One exhibition I’m glad I didn’t miss was the giant show of Renaissance portraits that I saw back in early 2012.

The Met is a ten or fifteen minute jog across the park for me, though I don’t get there as often as I would like. I particularly like portraits, which feed the fascination with people, the curiosity about what they’re really like inside, that led me to my two careers of writer and therapist.

Getting your portrait painted was serious business back in the quattrocento, much like Victorian portrait photography, though more expensive, I imagine. No spontaneous poses, no “Say formaggio!”

In the early portraits, both men and women were invariably shown in profile (“Do you think they were familiar with Egyptian art?” my companion asked), unflattering as that view was to some of the sitters’ aquiline or otherwise generous noses.

Instead of wedding photos, couples of means had their portraits painted together to commemorate a marriage. I can imagine all sorts of stories about them, especially the gentleman in red and what must have been his much younger wife.

If you think 21st century hairstyles are weird, look at what the Florentine gentlemen were doing with their hair. The blurbs at the museum said this fetching style was called a zazzera. The glossary of the website florentine-persona.com defines zazzera as “a tuft or lock of hair on a man's head, especially in front.” In this case, I think a couple of pictures are worth a lot more than thirteen words of definition. The glossary makes up for its understatement by informing us that “a man with such a notable tuft or front lock” was called a zazzeruto. Notable, yes, that’s more like it. And “a very vain person, especially of his hair,” was called a zazzeatore. The older gentleman’s more conservative haircut makes him look, to my eyes, Roman—or almost modern.

Portraits have survived of some of the celebrities of the day. Here’s Giuliano de’ Medici, one of the family of merchant bankers who ruled Florence for three generations, painted by Botticelli. Considered a playboy compared to his brother Lorenzo, civic leader and patron of the arts, Giuliano was assassinated in the Cathedral (the Duomo) at the age of 25.

And here is Simonetta Vespucci, considered the most beautiful woman of her day and believed to be the model for Botticelli’s Venus on the Half Shell (no, that’s not what they really called it). Or perhaps it’s Simonetta, but not what she really looked like— the museum’s curators hedge their bets.

One of the most remarkable paintings in the exhibit was this one of an old man and his grandson, almost modern in the way it conveys their affection. While the expression “warts and all” would not be applied to portraiture for another three hundred years or so (it’s attributed to Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century), they’re such a prominent feature that if the artist had left them out, the painting would not have resembled the old man at all. The Met’s blurb kindly explained that he suffered from the disease of rhinophyma.

Wonderful as the paintings are, the portrait that fascinated me most, in a creepy kind of way, was a cast of the death mask of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

Known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, he was the most brilliant and celebrated member of a family that had it all: wealth, power, patronage of the arts. To whom can we compare them? The Kennedys? The Rockefellers? No, there’s no comparison, because the Medici weren’t hampered by electoral politics or income tax or the media. So here’s a man whose name and achievements are still remembered five hundred years after his death, and this is not a painting. It’s Lorenzo himself. It’s what the guy really looked like, stubble on chin and all.

Not only did I find this intimate glimpse of Lorenzo mesmerizing, but it also raised a lot of questions. Have we killed celebrity by glutting the market? Has the flood of new information and constantly emerging personalities made it a lot less likely for people’s reputations to live on? Would you want the world to be interested in what you look like five hundred years after you die? Would you want them to see you dead? How long a shelf life do you think today’s photographs will have? You post them on Facebook as soon as you take them, and then they're gone. For that matter, how long a shelf life does the planet have these days?

Voyage of Strangers

Writing this week's column was a special treat for me--mostly because it required me to first read the new novel by my friend and former Saturday blog-sister Elizabeth Zelvin. I've read many of Liz's short stories--I even included one of them in a mystery anthology for which I served as the editor several years ago--so I already knew her stories were outstanding. Now, I'm greatly pleased to report that this novel is excellent as well.

The following is a review I plan to post at Amazon.com next week, and I hope it adequately conveys the pleasure I got from the novel and provides an incentive for others to enjoy it also. Well done, Liz!

A journey of discovery

In her latest novel, Voyage of Strangers (Lake Union Publishing, 2014), Elizabeth Zelvin has done the seemingly impossible: she's written an educational and often factual fictional account of early searches for gold and trade routes in uncharted lands while providing nonstop suspense and entertainment throughout. It's sort of a pleasant cross between the textbook-like historical knowledge of a James A. Michener novel and the edge-of-your-seat thrills of an Indiana Jones adventure.

At the start of the book, young Diego Mendoza is one of the members of Christopher Columbus's 1492-1493 expedition to discover and explore the lands across the ocean to the west. He is thrilled to have been included but is also a bit terrified by the perils of this unknown world. (Who wouldn't be?) Soon after Columbus's fleet finds the Indies and begins building settlements there, Diego accompanies Columbus back to Spain, where Diego and his twelve-year-old sister Rachel face dangers as grave as those he saw across the sea: they are both Jewish, and this is the time of the Inquisition. As Columbus prepares for a second voyage, Diego realizes that the only way to protect his impulsive and sometimes reckless sister is to watch over her himself, and when the expedition finally sails Rachel comes along, disguised as a cabin boy called Rafael and serving as a scribe to Admiral Columbus. New threats await them, of course, both at sea and in the jungles and newly-established outposts of what Columbus has named Hispaniola.

One of the best things about this book is that it's not the New World discovery story that we learned about in school. This time the noble Columbus shows a dark side, in that his most important goal is to fill the coffers of his king and queen with the treasures he's certain he will find in these unspoiled and primitive lands. As a result he allows the enslaving and brutalization of the native Taino tribe. Since we readers witness all this through the eyes of Diego and Rachel, we see the cruelty of the Christian invaders and the terrible plight of the conquered as well as the stunning beauty of the area now known as the Caribbean.

What makes this book so outstanding, though, is not its setting or its realism or even the lessons it teaches. Its main strength lies in its wonderfully complex characters. Some of them, like King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, are real historical figures, but the most memorable come from Zelvin's imagination: Diego, Rachel, their aunt Marina, the evil Cabrera, the islander Hutia, and many others among the priests, natives, and seamen. These are people you'll remember long after you finish the novel. My favorite by far is Rachel, the delightful, fiery, compassionate young lady who longs to see the world and then realizes that in order to survive she must change and adapt--and grow up quickly.

I have a theory about why the novels and short stories of Elizabeth Zelvin always include such interesting and believable players. It's because she is herself a psychotherapist, and has probably seen every character quirk possible. She doesn't have to imagine some of these things, as most authors do; she's seen them and knows firsthand what makes people act the way they do and say the things they say. The application of this kind of knowledge and experience has never been more evident than in her new novel. Voyage of Strangers is a winner.

About the author:

Elizabeth Zelvin is a New York City psychotherapist and author of the Bruce Kohler mystery series, which started with Death Will Get You Sober and so far includes three novels, a novella, and five short stories. Liz's short stories have been nominated three times for the Agatha Award and for the Derringer Award. They have appeared several times in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (in press), and in a variety of anthologies and e-zines. Voyage of Strangers, her first historical novel, is the sequel to the Agatha-nominated mystery short story "The Green Cross." Liz's only explanation for how she came to write about the aftermath of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and the genocide of the Taino is that her protagonist, the young marrano sailor Diego, woke her up in the middle of the night, beating on the inside of her head and demanding that she tell his story.


As well as fiction, Liz has written two books of poetry, a professional book about gender and addictions along with numerous professional articles, and an album of original songs, Outrageous Older Woman. She works with clients on her online therapy site, LZcybershrink.com. Her author website is elizabethzelvin.com and her music website is lizzelvin.com. She is currently working on the sequel to Voyage of Strangers, which takes Diego to the Ottoman Empire and to Sao Tome, a remote island off the coast of Africa.

Liz, thanks again for a great read. I can't wait for the sequel!

What happens next?

by Elizabeth Zelvin

What's the question authors of fiction most want readers to ask? (No, it's not "How much?") I submit it's "What happens next?" Or as we say in New York, "So what happens next?" We're storytellers, and we want to engage our readers so completely that, like Scheherazade's husband, they wouldn't dream of shutting us up, much less killing us, before they find out how the story ends and, even better, how the next one starts.

I'd already thought of writing on this theme before I knew that today's would be my last for SleuthSayers except for an occasional guest slot in the future. Yes, this is my farewell to my delightful SleuthSayers blog buddies and the readers who have been kind enough to keep up with my rants and disquisitions on everything from cellphonismo to the latest crop of clichés, from murder ballads to mayhem in the Hamptons, from stalkers to stuffed animals. After more than two and a half years blogging here every other Saturday (and seven years of weekly posts, until this past January, on another mystery blog), I've decided to take that creative energy and apply it to the writing of my next novel.

That's the barebones version of what happens next in my writing career. There's a lot more to it. Until mid-February 2014, I thought that Voyage of Strangers, my historical novel about what really happened when Columbus discovered America (and sequel to two short stories that appeared in EQMM a couple of years back), was going to be my last novel. After 150 agent and editor rejections, I put the novel up on Facebook as an indie e-book, where my best efforts weren't enough to take it viral and I felt unwilling to pour my heart and a year of my life or more into the same discouraging process all over again.

What happens next? Enter my very own fairy godmother, in the unlikely guise of a senior acquisitions editor at Amazon Publishing. She loved Voyage of Strangers! Amazon's Lake Union imprint (literary and commercial fiction) wanted to give it "the audience it deserves"--magic words if ever I heard them, and they weren't the only ones. They said "advance." They said, "It's your book. You'll get thorough editing, but you're free to reject any and all changes you don't want." Best of all, they said, "Leave the promotion to us." After I'd finished pinching myself and asking if I was dreaming, I found myself more than willing for "next" to be writing another novel: the sequel to Voyage of Strangers, in which readers can find out what happens next to my protagonist, the young marrano sailor Diego Mendoza, and his sister Rachel.

What could not happen next was a continuation of Diego's and Rachel's relationship with Admiral Columbus in the New World. At the end of Voyage, they are heartsick at the genocide of the Taino, which they can do nothing to prevent, and sail back to Europe at the beginning of 1495. Nor can they return to Spain, where the Inquisition is pursuing any Jews who might not have complied with the Expulsion in 1492 or converted to Christianity but whose sincerity might be tested by torture.

Just as the backbone of crime fiction is the progression from crime to investigation to solution, the backbone of historical fiction is what really happened. Here's what really happened to the Jews: many of them fled to Portugal and parts of Italy where Jews were still tolerated, such as Sicily and Firenze (Florence). In Voyage, I sent Diego's parents and older sisters to Firenze, where the Medici were willing to harbor them. Diego and Rachel expect to find them there. Oops. Early in 1494, King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy, including Florence. The Medici fled, and so did the Jews. Many of them ended up in Turkey, where Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire allowed them to settle.

In Portugal, within eight months, King João decided he didn't want the Jews after all. They were given a choice between leaving, converting, and being killed. Worse, he ordered the abduction and enslavement of two thousand Jewish children, who were forcibly converted, thrown onto ships, and transported to São Tomé, a pestilential island off the west coast of Africa, where those who survived would work the sugar plantations alongside slaves from the Guinea Coast.

So Diego and Rachel will have to cross war-ravaged Europe (where starving, unpaid soldiers would descend on villages like locusts in miles-wide swarms) and then to Istanbul in search of their family. Meanwhile, a young girl is torn from her family on the Lisbon docks and marked for slavery in São Tomé. Don't you want to know what happens next? So do I! And that's why I've got to give up blogging and write Journey of Strangers.

The new edition of Voyage of Strangers--e-book, trade paperback, and audiobook--will be out in September. My Bruce Kohler mystery series--Death Will Get You Sober, two more novels, a novella, and several short stories--is all available on Amazon. You can find me on my website at elizabethzelvin.com and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/elizabeth.zelvin. Finally, I have new short stories coming out soon, one in AHMM and two in Sisters in Crime anthologies.

Note: As this post appears live, you're seeing my new headshot, taken on my 70th birthday, and getting the first look anywhere ever at Amazon's wonderful new cover for Voyage of Strangers. Highly motivated once more, I'm 35,000 words into the sequel, which tells an even more dramatic story of the Iberian Diaspora. I can hardly wait to share it with you all!

Evolution of a Reader

by Elizabeth Zelvin

The older I get, the pickier I get as a reader. Life is too short, and I'm too experienced a reader to waste my time on books I'm not enjoying. I admit that as a reader, I take full advantage of the lower prices of e-books. I still buy hardcovers of the few cherished authors I hope will keep their series going forever and the even fewer I trust to write a new series I'll love almost as much as the last. And if I attend a friend's book launch party, I buy the book. Otherwise, if I lose interest or get annoyed, that's it for me. I'll close the book, toss it in a box to be given away, or in rare instances, throw it across the room.

I can remember only one book that I actually chucked into the garbage. It was a battered paperback of a Robert Heinlein science fiction novel I'd never read before and picked up for 25 cents at the outdoor bargain table of a library in the Hamptons. I'll spare you the title, because I don't want anybody else to read it if they can possibly help it. It was written in 1982, so there's no excuse for the scene that made me dump it in with the chicken bones and coffee grounds: where the genetically engineered superwoman protagonist runs into one of the guys who gang-raped her earlier in the book, forgives him when he explains he only participated because he found her so sexy, and invites him to be part of her group marriage.

One aspect of my long experience as a mystery writer is that I can now see plot twists coming and unidentified villains lurking a mile away. This doesn't necessarily mean I'd be a good detective in real life. But I know crime fiction conventions, and as they say, there are only seven original plots. The unreliable narrator, the cross-dresser or transsexual, the dissociated identity because the character was molested as a child are all familiar ploys. When the detective, amateur or professional, mulls over the motives of every possible suspect but one, I know that one will turn out to be the killer.

Spotting the solution does not make me stop reading. It just makes me feel kind of clever. However, bad writing, flat characterization, and insipid dialogue do. I've found these in debut novels and highly touted bestsellers alike, just as I've found delightful characters and what a couple of my own reviewers, bless them, have called deft prose, all along the spectrum. I'm also looking for intelligent plotting, whether it's plausible detection in a puzzle or police procedural or actual suspense in a novel of suspense.

Nowadays I still read quite a bit of crime fiction, though a lot less than I used to. I read a little SF and fantasy, a very little literary fiction (I was a college English major and have done my time with those and the classics), and an occasional book that would qualify as romance. More and more of my reading in all these genres is historical fiction, which I've always liked, and which naturally interests me more since I started writing it myself. Whatever I read, the writing has to be top-notch and the stories character driven.

Here's the short list of authors by whom I don't want to miss a single book: At the top, Lois McMaster Bujold, Diana Gabaldon, Sharon Shinn, Julia Spencer-Fleming, Naomi Novik, Laurie R. King, Charlaine Harris, Michael Gruber. The late Reginald Hill was on that list as well. Second tier, Deborah Crombie, William Kent Krueger, Sara Paretsky, Margaret Maron. For their best-known series characters, I still read Marcia Muller, Dana Stabenow, and Nevada Barr. New to me in 2013, and good enough that I went back and got the earlier books and/or will definitely read the next one: Jane Casey, Linda Lee Peterson, and Anne Cleeland. Oh, and Robert Galbraith, aka JK Rowling: I can't wait for the sequel to The Cuckoo's Calling.

Flying

by Elizabeth Zelvin

Who hasn’t dreamed of flying? To oversimplify the classic interpretations of flying dreams, Freud saw them as symbolic of sexuality, while for Jung, they signified freedom and transcendence. We live in an era in which sexuality is out in the open, while freedom and transcendence are still hard to come by. Although I’m a shrink as well as a writer, what interests me most about dreams is how they feel: gloriously exhilarating and utterly convincing, so that I wake thinking that maybe, just maybe, I could fly in waking life.

My favorite fictional descriptions of flying appear in Sharon Shinn’s Samaria series, which appears in the first book to be fantasy but is revealed over the course of the series as science fiction, albeit brilliantly character driven and superbly plotted. The beings who share the planet Samaria with humans are known as angels. They have powerful wings that allow them to fly to great heights from which they use their glorious singing voices to intercede with the god on behalf of the people.

He ascended effortlessly into the opalescent whiteness of the cloudless morning sky. Higher and higher, aiming straight for the zenith of the heavens, so high that even to his superheated blood the air seemed cool; so high that beyond the blank blueness of the sky he could sense an eternal, waiting night….Aloft in the icy air…Gabriel flung his arms wide and began to sing. He could hear every sound, this high up: the rhythmic stroking of his great wings, the brief catch and intake of his own breath, the faint sluicing of blood through the canals of his ears. – Sharon Shinn, Archangel

Because of the rain, she had flown in low, and now she spiraled upward over the broken mountain. The air was treacly, clinging to her wings with actual malice; she had to fight her way higher to get as far above the storm as possible. Even after she cleared the worst of the rain, the air about her felt dense and unforgiving…. Usually, this far above the earth, the air currents felt alive; even before she started singing, she would hear the echoes of her wingbeats batted from star to star. – Sharon Shinn, Jovah’s Angel

She flung herself aloft…and beat her wings against the sullen air….It felt good to fly, to unfurl her clenched wings and feel the thick, viscous ocean air lay its cushions under her feathers. – Sharon Shinn, The Alleluia Files

She…drove her wings in short hard sweeps against the air…She was aware of the steady, rhythmic beating of her wings, the tensing and relaxing of the sinews across her back, but nonetheless she felt like she was floating through the air. She…drifted peacefully across the broken terrain, silent and light as milkweed, circled once over the rocky margin of the shore, and settled easily a few yards from the sea. – Sharon Shinn, The Alleluia Files

I’d be happy to tell you that in my dreams, I soar high into the sky like Samaria’s angels. But I don’t. In my most consistent recurring dream about flying, I hover about three feet from the ground and have to push at the air with my hands in a kind of dog-paddle to stay up. When I try to remember more, the image that springs to my mind is the sidewalk in front of my parents’ house in Queens. My interpretation: I started having this dream when I was so young that I wasn’t allowed to cross the street. But you know what? It still gives me an enormous sense of freedom—the phrase “ability to escape” floats into my mind as I write this, and you’re welcome to interpret that however you like—and I’d be thrilled if I could really do it. I wake from this dream thinking, “How hard could it be? If I just push against the air....”

What are your dreams of flying like?

My get-up and go is alive and well

by Elizabeth Zelvin

Back in the Fifties, the Weavers used to sing a song:

How do I know my youth is all spent
My get-up and go has got up and went
But in spite of it all, I’m able to grin
When I think of the places my get-up has been.

I’ve been unable to find the songwriter. Most references I googled said “Anonymous,” and the book Chicken Soup for the Golden Soul claims it’s copyrighted material without saying who holds the copyright. I sang that song myself many times long before anybody took chicken soup out of the bowl and put it between book covers. And I had the impression it was written by Lee Hayes, the legendary bass vocalist with the Weavers.

As I get older…and older and older…the song, which I always thought was fun, gets more and more relevant. My father, who lived to 91, used to be the living embodiment of the final stanza:

I wake up each morning and dust off my wits
Open the paper and read the obits
And if I’m not there, I know I’m not dead
So I eat a good breakfast and roll back in bed.

I reached the mid-sixties, an age at which my contemporaries were just starting to die of what’s sometimes called natural causes, at around the same time as my first novel was finally published. I’ve had interesting friends all my life. Even if I hadn’t seen or been in contact with some of these people for decades, they remained vivid in my mind. I always assumed that one day they’d pick up the phone or I’d shoot them an email, and we’d pick up exactly where we left off. It’s been a shock to realize that with some of them, that isn’t going to happen.

I admit one of my many feelings on learning of the passing of these friends from junior high and high school was disappointment that they’d never know I’d finally achieved this lifelong ambition or get to enjoy the book.

But of course, that wasn't all. I felt cheated of the catching up and schmoozing we could have done. I wanted to know how they were affected by the civil rights and antiwar movements of the Sixties and by the women’s movement later on. I wanted to know if they got to write their books and paint their pictures and play their music and travel all over the world. I wanted to know if they had fun. I wanted to know if they were happy.

Several of the friends I lost at that age were academics. To some extent, they lived the lives that most of our parents back in Queens expected us to. I’m in the other group, those that jumped the rails—and believe me, for this old English major, running off with genre fiction was an act of rebellion—and reinvented ourselves every few years.

On the other hand, academics of our generation could be and often were political firebrands. Having survived all that, they should have gotten to retire—a state that no longer means golf and bridge and Florida as it did in my parents’ day, but a turning of their energies to a new set of dreams and ambitions. One high school buddy, whose career was even more checkered than mine—poet, therapist, and stand-up comic (“I’m not a shrink, I’m an expand!”)—got cancer shortly after finally inheriting enough to relieve his endless scrabbling for a living.

Now I'm staring 70 in the face. I'll have passed that milestone by the time you read my next blog post. I've lost many more friends, and others are dealing with life-threatening and debilitating illnesses as well as losses of their own. I've also published more books and short stories, released an album of original songs, helped a lot more people in my other role as a therapist, and gotten to enjoy my grandchildren as they grow.

Grandkids are the payoff for all that showing up for adult life we have to do and what our kids put their parents through. If I live as long as my mother did (and let the planet please not fall apart by then), I have a good chance of dancing at my granddaughters' weddings, cradling their children, and maybe even holding their first published books in my hands. In the meantime, I've decided that 70 is the new 39. I'm old enough to remember Jack Benny, and his shtick was that no matter how many years went by, his age was always 39. So if I feel like it, I can stay 70 forever.

Review: Voyage of Strangers by Elizabeth Zelvin

It’s always nice to see writers try something new and different and out of their comfort zone. Elizabeth Zelvin, our Sleuthsayers colleague, has taken a big step away from her very New York detective Bruce Kohler and his friends in therapy and in recovery to tackle the lethal adventures and messy politics of Columbus’s New World voyages.
Most of us learned about Columbus from the famous rhyme and the annual school holiday. The rest of the curriculum on the Conquistadores focused on the clashes with the Aztecs and Mayans and on the destruction of the Inca Empire. But exploitation, pillage and genocide hit the New World earlier, with what became the disastrous landing of the famous flotilla on the Caribbean islands.

So devastating was the meeting between Europeans and the native Taino and Caribe, that very little of their culture now survives. Ironically, a voyage that set out to find the East Indies for trading purposes degenerated into a scramble for gold, and when that proved thin on the ground, for slaves.

Zelvin’s Voyage of Strangers finds a way into this now obscure episode via a character who is a stranger to both the Spanish crew and the natives they encounter. Diego, a teenaged sailor in the Admiral's fleet, has a big secret: he is an unconverted Jew and as such vulnerable to arrest and death at the hands of the Inquisition.

Zelvin says that Diego “came knocking on the inside of my head in the middle of the night, demanding that I tell his story.” The young sailor showed up originally for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine stories, but he hung around until she gave him a novel of his own. Voyage of Strangers begins with him covertly saying his prayers up in the crow’s nest of the Santa Maria, then returns him to the scarcely less dangerous Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, where the Moors have recently been defeated and enslaved, and the Jews, the next target, forced to flee, convert or perish at the stake.

Diego is protected by Admiral Columbus, a friend of his father’s, and he hopes to make money in the New World, thus recouping his family’s lost fortune. For the moment, he puts aside some nagging worries about the treatment of Taino friends and focuses on getting his younger sister, Rachel, safely out of Seville and off to their parents living in exile in Florence.

This proves easier said than done. Diego is a paragon of an older brother, but Rachel, though charming in every way, is a handful. She’s sure that she can pass as Christian, having spent some time hiding in a convent; what’s worse is that she’s also sure she can pass as a boy, and she fully intends to accompany Diego on the Admiral’s next voyage.

The novel really is in two parts, the Spanish segment, involved with the preparations for the second and much larger expedition to the New World, the dangers of the Inquisition, and the difficulties of traveling safely with a lively girl of thirteen, and the sea voyage and the delights and terrors of the islands.

The island segment is more gripping and unusual. Zelvin, who has visited in the Caribbean and knows tropical climates well after a time in Côte d’Ivoire as a Peace Corps volunteer, does a good job of imagining the lush island with its spectacular hills and waterfalls, abundant food and generally easy living. Alas, the beauty of the island is soon tarnished by the demands of European military architecture and an obsessive pursuit of gold that eventually corrupts even Diego’s admired Admiral Columbus. For a time, however, the brother and sister enjoy the freedom of the forest and the friendship of the Taino, whose generous and easy going culture will prove no match for rapacious guests operating in a completely different economic system.

Voyage of Strangers is very good on the tragic clash of cultures that ensues. Diego, particularly, is almost preternaturally understanding and broad-minded, although his own experience as a hunted minority does give him an insight into the plight of the Taino.

The story of the young people and their adventures acts somewhat to ameliorate what is otherwise an unrelievedly grim account of the conquest of the Caribbean. Diego and Rachel and their Taino friend Hutia are good company. The island, at least initially, is an adventure playground, and the novel, as well as its quite modern characters, is both suitable and historically enlightening for teen as well as adult readers.

Deus Ex Librarica?

On the 16th of November, Elizabeth Zelvin posted an article here, concerning the literary longevity of contemporary writers. Her post inferred the question:

 Will any contemporary authors be remembered one hundred years from now? 

 In the comments section of that post, Eve Fisher mentioned the possibility of a natural or man-made disaster disrupting the national power grid between now and that future time, making the printed word a precious commodity once more.

 Eve’s comment interested me because, as a Special Forces Engineer Sergeant, part of my training included an in-depth examination of Target Analysis.

 Put simply, Target Analysis is the study of national supply networks (electrical distribution systems, transportation systems, fuel distribution systems, etc.) and how to disrupt them at different levels.

 On this post-Thanksgiving day, when we’re all probably still sleepy from the aftermath, I’m not going to explain details about Target Complexes, Target Components, or the decision matrices used to determine which Target Components to destroy in order to disrupt a Target Complex for a desired time period.  (Besides:  It's one thing to post very basic general explosives information, and quite another to explain how and where to plant explosives in order to disrupt national supply networks.)

 Instead, I’d like to present a sort of game, proposing a theoretical scenario and asking you to answer a question.

Reading the post, and the comments by Elizabeth and Eve, I began to consider:  What would happen if I were given the choice of which authors might be read 100 years from now?  Which authors would I choose?  And, if I knew books were about to become a rare commodity, which books would I try to preserve for humanity?

The Scenario: 

 An advanced alien race intercepted one of our Voyager probes and interpreted it in a hostile manner. Now, they are afraid that violent humans might soon begin exploring space.

 After long deliberation, they made a weighty decision. They recently took over all airwaves on our planet, to broadcast a very apologetic message, in which they explained their intentions to bombard Earth with atomic turkey legs, in an attempt to set us back to a time of medieval technological capabilities.

An Atomic Turkey Leg
.005 seconds after explosion

 Immediately following this announcement, the attack began. The atomic turkey leg explosions did great blast damage, leveling all large cities and killing millions, but—due to advanced alien technology—the explosions released virtually no deadly radiation.

 They did, however, wreak havoc through Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) generation, knocking out the world’s electrical systems and turning most contemporary automobiles into little more than oversized paper weights.


Because you are such a kind person, however, you have recently come into custody of a running vehicle.

 You were lucky enough to flee built-up areas of civilization, before the attack commenced, and wound up in a rural zone where you met an old man trying to get to his dying wife’s bedside.

He owned a well-maintained 1974 Ford Pinto hatchback, but couldn’t see well enough to drive. Because you were kind enough to drive him to his wife’s care home, he gave you the car—which is old enough that the EMP didn’t effect it. He also gave you a map and key to a blast/fallout shelter, stocked with years of food and other supplies, which he owns a few miles away.

 While you’re driving to the shelter, an alien ship flies overhead, large loudspeakers blaring: “People of Earth, we remind you that we really feel bad about this. But, we’re doing it because we think you wouldn’t feel bad about doing this to us, so we’re trying to protect ourselves. In the interests of killing as few of you as possible—now that most of you are dead—we’d like to let you know that we will shortly begin Phase II of our plan.

 "In thirty minutes, we will target the remaining centers of knowledge or industry on your planet with laser weapons that will destroy anything within a 100-yard radius. These secondary targets include all still-existing factories, refineries, libraries and research facilities.

 "Please remember: There’s nothing personal in this attack. We just want to bomb you back to a technological base which will keep us safe for a bit longer. Thank you! And have a nice day.”

 As the announcement concludes, you drive over the top of a rise and see that a tiny town on your route has incongruously built a large 4-story library. An alien ship hovers nearby, waiting to destroy the library in thirty minutes.

 The shelter you’re driving toward is about five minutes beyond this town. Brave soul that you are, however, you floor it and drive straight to the library to begin loading books into your car, intent on preserving some of humanity’s hard-won knowledge.

 The Question: 

 You have just under 30 minutes to gather books within a large library, and store them in a ’74 Pinto. The pic on the right should give you some idea how much room you have inside the hatchback.

 Though the power is out, preventing you from using the computer to locate any books, you’re excited to discover that this particular library has maintained their card catalogue for some reason. Thus, there is a way to find the call number of non-fiction books.

 Which books would you take?

 Maybe you’d take particular types of books. Or, perhaps there is a book that you feel has greater importance than any other, so maybe you’d grab that one, then try to find others.

 You’re losing time, if you stand there thinking. You’ve got to act quickly. So, what do you do?

 Maybe, you’d like to list the first five or ten books you’d try to save.

 Perhaps you’ve thought this out before, and would like to share your plan with us.

 Your answer(s) and how you approach your decision is up to you, and you alone. But please let us know, in the comments section, what you would do.

 You’ll find my answer in the comments section, too. 

See you in two weeks,
--Dixon

A motley crew—and proud of it!

by Elizabeth Zelvin

SleuthSayers celebrated its second anniversary this week, and we were all asked to write something appropriate to the occasion. The topic that popped into my mind and wouldn’t go away was what a fascinating and diverse bunch of people my blog brothers and blog sisters are.

Elizabeth, Dale, David, RT

I had already been blogging weekly for five years on a group blog when Leigh Lundin, at the suggestion of editor Janet Hutchings of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, invited me to join the roster of “crime writers and crime fighters” that was rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the popular Criminal Brief blog. My blog sisters over at Poe’s Deadly Daughters are not exactly all of a kind as people or as mystery writers. However, we are all women, all novelists, and all write within a certain range of mystery fiction along the spectrum from cozy to traditional to medieval noir. Our readers, too, as far as we can tell, fall mainly in the category of mystery-reading women of a certain age.

So for me, part of the appeal of SleuthSayers was that it offered collegiality with short story writers, law enforcement and military professionals, and guys. I’d have been even more eager to sign up if I’d known that, like me, several of my new blog buddies were musicians, singers, and songwriters. And it’s not just that the profiles of my fellow bloggers were different from those of my fellow Deadly Daughters and most of the other bloggers I knew. I had no idea how widely the subject matter of the posts themselves would range and how different the whole flavor of SleuthSayers would be from anything I’d read before.

One of the topics I found the most mindblowing and unexpected was Dixon Hill on explosives and how to use them. Dix swears the information he posted is not detailed enough to make your own minefield in your least favorite neighbor’s backyard. But he said enough to make me nervous. Very few folks in my usual circles can say, as Dix did, “Now, I’ve fired all sorts of weapons,” and list a paragraph’s worth from sniper rifles to machine guns (“I can dance with one of these pretty well”) to light anti-tank weapons (“not reloadable, whatever you saw in that Dirty Harry movie”)—and follow it up with “I’ve used them in the desert, the jungle, the African bush, …the ocean, on the beach after swimming…in rain, snow and ice storms, and probably in more places than I care to remember!”

Now, I’ve been in a lot of these places, including the desert—Timbuctoo, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited—and the African bush, when I spent two years in the Peace Corps in Côte d’Ivoire. And I’ve just spent the summer riding the waves on an ocean beach in the Hamptons. But no weapons were involved. There was a period in my youth when I had a certain number of friends who owned copies of The Anarchist Cookbook. But as far as I know, none of them ever tried any of the recipes. It was more a harmless kind of showing off, like getting a tattoo today.

The colleague whose posts probably come the closest to what I’m used to are those by my Saturday blog buddy (we alternate), brilliant and prolific short story writer John Floyd. John’s the only one of the gang I knew before joining SleuthSayers. I had a story in an anthology he edited for Wolfmont Press. He’s a crackerjack editor with a keen ear for language and an eye for what makes a story work. And I’m not just saying that because he accepted “Death Will Trim Your Tree” for The Gift of Murder without changing so much as a comma. (Not that that isn’t one of the reasons I love him, along with his delicious Southern drawl and what a true gentleman he is.) We both post about writing, among other things. We both love movies, but we barely have a favorite in common. (Okay, John, Blazing Saddles and In Bruges are probably on my long list, and I bet you enjoyed Seven Psychopaths, as I did.)

I could go on about every one of my fellow SleuthSayers, but (unlike some of y’all) I like to keep my posts below 800 words. Reading and being one of them/you/us is a helluva ride, and I’m in for another year!

Going Clamming

by Elizabeth Zelvin

One of the best kept secrets in the fashionable Hamptons is a beautiful peninsula called Gerard Drive, a narrow road winding its way between the wetlands of Accabonac Harbor and the open expanse of Gardiners Bay. On a clear day, it looks as if you could throw a stone to Gardiners Island, the private domain on which they say the pirate Blackbeard buried his treasure. The Gardiner of the day caught him at it, captured and sent him off to England to be hanged, while the family has been eating off the buccaneer’s gold plates to this day. Or so they say.

If you meet any oldtimers while you’re getting your shellfish permit at the Town Clerk’s office in East Hampton, they won’t tell you where to find the shellfish. But if you run or walk your dog or bike or rollerblade on Gerard Drive, you can’t help seeing clammers, sometimes almost dryshod on the mud flats at low tide and sometimes waist deep and balancing precariously as they reach into the mud under their feet for the makings of a classic chowder. It looks so easy....

I discovered the hard way, ie, by becoming eligible for Medicare one day at a time, that shellfish permits are actually permanent and free to seniors. (You spring chickens will have to get one every year and pay a fee for it.) I kept meaning to go and use it, along with the clam gauge that indicates when a clam is too small to keep legally. But the tide table for Accabonac Harbor is another well kept secret, and since they built dug a channel, letting water from the bay go in and out more easily at a point about a mile from the mouth of the harbor (between the tip of Gerard Drive and the delightfully named Louse Point), the mud flats only get uncovered when low tide is very low indeed.

I run three miles along that drive every day I can when I’m out there. The air is filled with birdsong, wildflowers abound, deer and rabbits dart across the road, and the sparkling air and glinting water demonstrate why artists rave about the East Hampton light. I’m always looking for clues to that extra-low tide, and one day last year, during a three-day stretch of absolutely perfect weather, I found it. Ospreys and herring gulls have no trouble catching seafood, so why should I? I gathered up my gear and permit (couldn’t find the clam gauge) and made ready to hunt the wild clam.

Now came the hard part: getting my hubby to come with me. His idea of paradise is a big chair, an open window with the breeze blowing through it, and a good book. Well, his real idea of paradise is the streets of New York City. But he was there, and I wasn’t letting him off. I had to share the fun, didn’t I? And what are husbands for if not to carry the rake, the bucket, and, one hopes, the clams?

Alas, the clams did not cooperate. We spent a couple of hours stooped over and burrowing in the muck with toes and fingernails. Not a clam. A couple stationed maybe fifty yards from us were literally raking them in. “This is a good spot!” the woman kept exclaiming. Unfortunately, clam etiquette forbids poaching on someone else’s spot. But I kept inching closer. A couple of young women came splashing out, politely avoided the first couple’s spot, and quickly found another that yielded not only clams but a large oyster and a crab or two.

My husband was not a happy clammer. Nor was I—but I didn’t want to go home without clams. It happens that our favorite gourmet farm market, whose clam chowder is a perfect 10, didn’t make it at all last season, and we were both feeling chowder deprived. You need about three dozen good sized clams to make a pot of chowder. That wasn’t happening. Finally, the two young women kindly offered to share their spot. Within minutes, my husband got a clam. One. To make a long story short, we ended up with half a dozen clams, two medium-sized and the other four—well, let’s say it’s just as well we couldn’t find our clam gauge and that the Marine Patrol didn’t happen to come along.

Did I make clam chowder? You betcha. It was kind of like the stone soup of folklore—putting a big nothing in the pot and adding all the other ingredients. But was it good? It was delicious.

A version of this post first appeared on the blog Mystery Lovers Kitchen.

Swimming in the Ocean

by Elizabeth Zelvin

I’m reveling in the all-too-brief season when you don’t have to be a polar bear to immerse yourself in the vast, salty playground that covers more than half of our planet and entices folks like me to cavort in the foaming surf around its edges. Yep, I’m talking about going to the beach, which to me is synonymous with swimming in the ocean.

I’ve been an ocean lover since childhood, when we used to visit an aunt and uncle who had a summer house in Hampton Bays, which back in those days was too working class to be considered one of “the Hamptons.” My grandmother, mother, and aunt were all indefatigable swimmers. To this day, I look incredulously at women on the beach who obviously have no desire to wet their hair, their bathingsuits, or even the polish on their toenails. Aren’t they hot? Do they know what they’re missing? How can they stand it?

Adolescent girls, on the other hand, plunge happily into the breaking waves. When I’m swimming alone, without a spotter, I sometimes elect a bunch of them my buddies. I ask them to keep an eye out for me in case I get in trouble. And I tell them to cherish the moment, because when they get to be my age, they may no longer have either the nerve or the companionship they’re enjoying now.

The Atlantic’s face is always changing. Every day is different. (I remember going to the beach in La Jolla, CA and being amazed at the reliability of the Pacific, at least between the frequent jetties: the waves were exactly the same from day to day.) My favorite set of conditions is when the tide is at the right height for me to stand beyond the breakers and sail across high rollers for that heavenly moment of weightlessness, then land on my feet again. To make it perfect, the water has to be warm enough not to shock me but cool enough to be exhilarating, and there can’t be any undertow to taint my mood with fear or make it difficult, when I’m ready, to get back onto the beach on my feet.

How different people like to take their ocean water seems to vary, to some extent, by gender. Most of the body surfers are guys, who catch the breaking wave and ride it toward shore, arms extended like aquatic versions of Superman in the air. Most women, like me, seem to prefer riding the rollers, calling “Under!” and “Over!” as each wave invites them to dive or soar. Lap swimmers seem to be evenly divided. I used to body surf myself—out of sheer competitiveness and a burning desire not to miss anything—but that was thirty-five years ago. I do swim laps in the ocean occasionally—a day when the water is safe and smooth enough for me to do a half-mile of the crawl, with breathing, is even more rare than a day when the waves are perfect for jumping.

The ultimate: clear day, perfect water temperature, waves just high enough to be exciting but without enough power to make getting back to shore difficult—and the company of someone who enjoys both ocean swimming and schmoozing as much as I do.

Disinhibition and the New Technology

by Elizabeth Zelvin

When I started doing psychotherapy online a dozen years ago, I learned that psychologists and other technicians had already identified what they called the disinhibition factor in the way people communicated on the Internet. In The Psychology of Cyberspace (2001, revised 2002, 2003, & 2004), psychologist John Suler, who became a collegial buddy of mine when I joined the International Society of Mental Health Online, identified various beliefs that contribute to this disinhibition when people are texting (at that time, not yet a verb in common use) online, including:

“You don’t know me.”
“You can’t see me.”
“See you later.”
“It’s all in my head.”
“It’s just a game.”
“We’re equals.”

The truth, even inevitability, of the disinhibition factor quickly became apparent to me when I became an Internet user.

Sometimes the lack of inhibition is benign, as when online therapy clients feel safer and reveal themselves more freely than they might in face-to-face therapy in an office, not to mention their daily lives. What makes these particular clients good candidates for online therapy is that they do feel safer writing and not being seen than they do in person and are at their most candid in cyberspace.

At the Sisters in Crime breakfast at Malice Domestic back in May, the woman who sat down next to me looked familiar. She was new to crime writing, and this was her first mystery convention, but we eventually figured out we knew each other from the neighborhood in New York City and had crossed paths in a non-writing area of our lives. Breakfast was over before we’d had time for much conversation. But within three days of getting home and starting to exchange emails, we had discovered several crucial interests in common, shared a lot of personal information, and were both excited about this new friendship.

Sometimes the disinhibition becomes toxic, as in the flame wars—uninhibited hostility and verbal abuse—that can spring up in online group situations such as chats and e-lists. I’ve seen flaming, on and off, in almost all of the mystery e-lists I’ve participated in for the past decade. I’ve even seen it happen in groups of online mental health professionals. On a rational level, they should know better, right? But the disinhibition isn’t rational: it’s a psychological reflex.

When we text asynchronously, as in email, cell phone texting, and on Facebook, we don’t get the constant feedback of face to face communication, small signals that we can interpret as negative reception. Part of what inhibits us in sharing our thoughts is fear of how the listener will receive them. (When we want feedback, as in a therapist’s active listening, there are text-based techniques to provide it. But that’s another story.) To Suler’s take on invisibility, “You can’t see me,” let’s add, “I can’t see you—so I don’t have to worry about what you think of what I’m saying or censor what I say to please you.”

All of the above applies to text. So how do we account for cell phone users’ habit of blatting private matters wherever they are—on the street, on line in the post office, on a crowded bus? That’s an egregious form of disinhibition. Hardened cellphonistas let it all hang out, whether the “it” is marital conflict, finances, or intimate medical details.

I find it mega-irritating when cellphonistas do it. But it’s not a new phenomenon. In New York, where I live, people have always carried on intimate conversations in restaurants and on the subway. I’ve done it myself. One of the city-dweller’s defenses is to create psychological space. Even if the physical distance between me and the strangers at the next table is only an inch or two, as I get absorbed in conversation, I easily forget they’re there. So maybe it doesn’t have as much to do with technology as we think it does.