9.22.11

I am unsettled.

So here I sit, sneaking a Hershey's Kiss I liberated from someone's candy bowl in St. Louis, pondering.

It's September, which means change is afoot. Facebook rolled out a bunch of craziness last night, the iPhone 4s or 5 will be here shortly, Where All the Dead Lie is out in the world, my to do list has grown a third head, and it's getting cooler out. I don't normally do well with change. I'm a Taurus. We like to have things a certain way, and don't want people messing with our stuff.

All right. To be honest, the day after a release is always a bit of a downer. You've spent all your time and energy pushing your new baby out, and now the nurses have taken him away to that faraway display bassinet, and you're left with your overfull breasts and sore body and an overhwlming desire to sleep which is countermanded by your biological need to reconnect with your child immediately.

Sigh.

Change. It does suck.

I'm done traveling for the foreseeable future, which means I get to unpack. We are going to redo the kitchen - and as I brewed my tea this morning, I will admit to standing, mouth agape, I'm sure, staring at the old refrigerator (white, dented, broken icemaker, basically a chilled stand for a set of overfull cabinets, paper plates, bread and potatoes) wondering what it's going to look like when we do built in shelves and replace it with stainless. And wondering if you can remove granite countertops in one piece without demolishing them? I'd like to give mine to Habitat for Humanity, but don't know if they'll come off well.

Then I wandered into the dining room, which we're also going to redo, and realized that once we take off the previous owners' grass mat, which resides below the chair rail, and repaint the room, (it's red now, and I'm sick of it) and sell the furniture, it's going to look MUCH bigger.

And we are buying a new car - and let me tell you, this is not an endeavor we undertake lightly. When I sold my beloved 4-Runner two years ago, it had just turned 18. And Randy's car just turned 11. We keep our stuff around for a long time, becoming quite attached. I cried so hard when I sold my truck. I hated to see him go.Last night we were literally fingers on the keys ready to drive off, but something stopped us, and we decided to sleep on it. Good thing we did - a deeper check into the car showed a bad accident that wasn't on the Carfax. So it's back to square 3 tonight (there's another in the running.)

We are not accumulators. We don't buy stuff just to buy stuff. We are doing our damndest to live a more minimalist lifestyle, with events instead of material goods. We gave away half our household last year, and damn if it doesn't seem like we need to do it again. Because of all the travel this year, things feels terribly cluttered.

Settling back into a work routine is messy as well. I was up until 1 AM two nights ago trying to sort through what has to happen now, what can wait until next week, and what waits until next month. My priority is the final edit on the May '12 book, due October 3, but I also had to do a line edit for a short story appearing next year, (Done and crossed off list - yay!) edit and bring pages of the sandwich book to group last night, plus do all the attendant release writing, publishing, tweeting and facebooking, plus juggle two other major projects I'm working on.

OK. I admit it. I am overwhelmed. And when I get overwhelmed, I shut down.

Hence the comforting bit of chocolate, and pondering. Which led me to the following, apropos of nothing, outside of the fact Facebook now wants me to categorize people, and I don't know which category name to use. And I know there are more like me who wonder. So. Help a sister out and take the poll.

And for you readers, when you take the poll, how do you refer to us? If you were going to say it aloud, which would it be - So and So is my favorite _________.

Share, chickadees. Give me something to distract myself.

9.20.11

Yay, Launch Day!

It's sort of surreal, really, because you spend weeks, months even, preparing for a book's release, and then the day hits, and you honestly feel like screaming if you ever hear your own name again. Gotta love PR.

It was a rather low-key day, actually. Finished ironing out the last few bits on the new Fan Page, worked on the top sekrit project, spent way too much time floating around Facebook and Twitter, did a couple of conference calls about another few projects, got my flu shot, put together the dinner menu - nothing terribly exciting. Tomorrow though, I'll go visit the book in the wild. And I have critique group, which means I'll get my head out of the clouds and back to work. They'll get chapters 2-3 of the sandwich book, and I hope they'll love it.

I have realized I have an inability to say no. Which isn't a good thing.

But today belongs to WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE.

Rachel asked where I got the impetus to have a spooky sort of tale. She mentioned one of my favorite short stories, THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, by Charlotte Gilman. It is a creepy tale of a woman going mad, and surely played into my thought process on Taylor's descent to the bottom.

When I realized I was writing a Gothic, I went back to the classics. THE YELLOW WALLPAPER was just the beginning. I reread THE MONKEY'S PAW by W.W. Jacobs, plus a host of other stories and movies - Hitchcock's fabulous movie VERTIGO, Daphne du Maurier's REBECCA, both film and book, Diane Setterfield's THE THIRTEENTH TALE, Sarah Waters's THE LITTLE STRANGER, Wilkie Collins THE WOMAN IN WHITE, and Horace Walpole's THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO.  

I wanted to be sure I had the right feel - the right texture to the story. Gothics aren't just ghost stories, there are important elements that need to be included. All of these stories are classic Gothic tales - combining elements of both horror and romance with a specific setting to create a sort of melodramatic terror-inducing state. Think of the story of how Frankenstein was written - Mary Shelley was partying with her literary buds, got herself spooked, had a terrible nightmare, and wrote it all down. FRANKENSTEIN is of course one of the finest in modern literature, but the way it came about lends itself to the Gothic tradition.

Add to all of that literary goodness was the tale of the Grey Lady of Glamis Castle, which I found during my research for the book. Glamis itself has an entire inventory of ghosts, ghouls and things that go bump in the night - and as such, was certainly the model for Dulsie Castle.

And then we went to Scotland ourselves, and bumped into our own ghost.

We went to Tulloch because it was the ancestral home of Clan Bayne - (MacBean) - the fine plaid-covered loins of which spawned my husband. We went to have tea. This was the view as we drive up - stunning, because, austere. We went inside and every single hair on my body stood on end.

Tulloch Castle, near Inverness, Scotland

Tulloch Castle Ghosts Look Out Windows

See the vaporous shapes in the windows? Trust me, those windows were clear as a bell to the naked eye. Didn't see that until we loaded the pictures later that night. But the minute I got inside, all I wanted to do was leave. Run. Get the hell out of dodge. That place is so full of malevolent spirits .... what was so weird though, was the silence - silence so pervasive it felt like a scream.

So that went into the book as well - that horrible feeling of being watched when you can't see anything.

Where All The Dead Lie isn't designed to frighten. I don't particularly care for being frightened myself. But it came out that way - a spooky, eerie, Gothic tale that just might give you a chill down your spine.

A Haunted Contest

SEE THE WINNERS HERE (Prizes must be claimed by October 31)

___________________

In honor of the Tuesday release of WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE:

I thought we'd do something different this time around. Since this is a book that at its heart is a ghost story, I thought it might be fun for you to share your own personal brush with a ghost, or share your favorite ghostly story.

To enter, all you have to do is leave your ghoulish tale in the comments.*

On October 15, I will announce the winners.

At stake:

2 copies of the fabulous DVD CASTLE GHOSTS OF SCOTLAND

3 $25 giftcards to the winners' choice of bookstore

5 copies of Daphne du Maurier's REBECCA 

and signed bookplates to all entries.

Winners will be drawn at random from the comments - all save 1.

GRAND PRIZE: The creepiest, scariest, spookiest tale will be my Halloween gift to my readers - with your permission and byline, of course. I'll send it to all of my newsletter list and post it on my blog, Facebook and Twitter. Word limit is 1500 or less.

My editor and I will do the judging, so make it good!

*For safety sake - I highly recommend you write your story in Word or RTF format, then copy and paste into the comments, so you don't do a lot of great work then lose it. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes, Squarespace likes to clear its throat.

9.16.11

My post from Murderati today:

It’s that time again.

I have a new book out on Tuesday. And since I’m at Bouchercon today, I thought I’d take this moment to share with you the journey I went on writing WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE.

(Journey? It was more like a hike up Everest, K9, and Rainier, all in a week.)

I got the idea for WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE on September 14, 2009, and started writing the book July 23, 2010. It was easier in the beginning. Or so I thought.

But back to the book's inception. I’d just returned from vacation, and had an unbelievable amount of work on my plate. I was getting ready to shoot the video for the OWN Network, so my thoughts were not exactly on writing as much as what I would wear. I was revising THE COLD ROOM, which was three books ago. I was starting to work on THE IMMORTALS, and slightly fleshing out a concept for SO CLOSE THE HAND OF DEATH. I was not thinking four books from that moment. Not at all. And yet, I was in the car, and heard a song by Tori Amos called “Welcome to England.”

And I saw Taylor stepping off a plane at Heathrow, into the waiting arms of Memphis Highsmythe. You may remember Highsmythe from THE COLD ROOM, the wounded Scottish Viscount who joined the Metropolitan Police of London – New Scotland Yard – a man who in many ways mirrors Taylor – the privileged upbringing, eschewing their parents’ wealth and influence to strike out on their own, a sense on longing, of solitude, even when surrounded by loved ones.

I was curious about why she would do such a thing, but knew I’d have to explore the idea. So I made myself some notes and put the idea away so I could focus on what was at hand.

But ideas like this, so big, so different, wend their way into your psyche. From that moment forward, I was writing toward this book, even though I wasn’t consciously doing so.

When it was time to start working on Dead Lie, I knew much more about the reasons for Taylor’s flight to England.

She’s been grievously injured. She’s not healing. She can’t work. She is deathly afraid of what all of this means.

And most importantly, she can’t talk.

Having a mute protagonist was terrifying for me. Dialogue is a hugely important part of my books, the interplay between Taylor and her team, her lover, the victims of the crimes she investigates – it’s not something I wanted to take from her. But I had to. She had to be forced into a corner and fight her way out. Not fight against a villain, but against herself.

And I wanted it to be more than that. This tale is very much a version of the classic fish out of water, a person set into an environment that is unfamiliar, unsettling. I knew I wanted to set the book in Memphis’s world, London and Scotland, with the Scottish Highlands as the backdrop, at Memphis’s ancestral home. His haunted castle. His Manderley.

Suddenly, I was writing a gothic. In the vein of Du Maurier’s Rebecca.  Complete with a questionable housekeeper, an errant friend, a dead first wife, and a serious case of PTSD.

When you’re used to the blistering pace of a serial killer thriller, and the ease of writing a mouthy protagonist, having both those crutches taken away from you is at once both scary and liberating. All the rules I’d followed in the books that came before were thrown out the window. I knew I wanted this to be a stand alone – even seven books in – especially because it’s seven books in. And it’s the first book printed in the trade paperback format – so it’s a chance to reset, if you will.

But well before the marketing decisions were made, I was struggling. The story was unfolding in ways I didn’t like. I kept returning to the proposal I’d written, in June of 2010, trying to find the thread that would lead me through.

The truth was, I was scared.

I’m still a relatively young writer – young as in this was only the eighth novel I’d written. I’d just lost my beloved editor, I was trying a completely new genre, and the resistance I was feeling, all self-imposed, of course, was stifling. As much as I wanted to tell this story, I just didn’t believe in myself. I didn’t think I could do it justice.

On the surface, everything was flowing wonderfully – I took two trips to Scotland for research, both of which were amazing – I highly recommend setting books in other countries so you’re forced to go outside of your comfort zone to make the stories come alive. I loaded the book with the things I’d seen – the setting wasn’t ever the problem. It was the story. Despite my proclamations to have a gothic, I kept trying to sandwich in a serial killer subplot.

While I was in Scotland the first time – the Peter Tobin case broke. Tobin is a Scottish serial killer who killed several women and was sentenced to life in prison. While we were in Scotland, the police connected him to Bible John, a serial killer from the 70s.

Now, the possibilities there were endless. And eerily reminiscent of Nashville’s own Wooded Rapist, who worked across town with a different MO and moniker – the Dome Light Rapist…

So I tried to dump all of that into the book, thinking the straight suspense wasn’t going to work.

I was wrong. The serial killer aspect of the book was terribly distracting. In the end, I cut the whole subplot.

There was a second subplot that disappeared – the story of John Baldwin’s son. Too much information, too little space to have it.

And still the book wasn’t working.

I’ve never walked away from a story before, but I nearly abandoned this manuscript several times. The thing about art is recognizing when something isn’t working, and giving yourself permission to walk away.

But I’m stubborn. And I loved this story.  I loved Taylor’s frailty. I loved the backdrop of Scotland. I loved that my incredibly strong heroine was seeing things, hearing things, being driven to the brink of insanity.

And that she had a true attraction to another man.

So I focused all my energy on Taylor and her forbidden relationship with Memphis.

I listened to the feedback form my beta readers, and then wonderful new editor.

I revised and revised and revised.

And two days before I was due to turn it in, the book came to life. After a looooooong conversation with one of my best friends, in which I expressed my desire to toss the book out the window, she said something that made me see all the missing pieces. I rushed through a full revision in two days, and boom, there it was.

You’d think that the more books you write, the easier it gets. The better you get at telling stories. The quicker you can lay down your ideas.

That just isn’t true.

Writers can be incredibly myopic. That’s why we have editors and beta readers and critique groups. It was my tribe that helped me see the forest for the trees in this one. And once I could see that forest, everything was so plain. I just needed to get out of my own way and let Taylor be the star. I’ve always seen her as unassailable. Perfect. Larger than life. In WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE, she is flawed. Physically and emotionally flawed. Weak, even.

And so much more interesting for it.

And here we are - eight revisions later - with a new baby being born. Makes it all worthwhile, really !

Where All The Dead Lie Trailer from JT Ellison on Vimeo.

9.8.11

I have not been writing.

God, I hate to admit that.

But it's true.

And it's becoming readily apparent to the folks around me, because I've been getting grumpy.

It's the two weeks leading up to the book launch, and as such there are many things to do. Blogs to write, newsletters to send, speeches to give. Hair to color, nails to get manicured, outfits to plan. Appearances and television and radio and signings and a conference - all in the span of two weeks. I'm already sick of myself, and I've been at it for exactly 24 hours.

It's crazy making, especially for introverts like me who get very run down being on, on, on. Sparkle! Author Girl is in da house! I adore it while I'm doing it, but when I'm done, I literally collapse.

And in all that, I sometimes lose sight of the end game. The only real responsibility I have is planting my butt in the chair, opening the manuscript, and writing.

I took the opening chapters of the sandwich book to my critique group last night. They loved it. Loved it so much that all I wanted to do was run home and dive into the pages and create, create, create!

But right now, my time is not my own. For the next few weeks, my time belongs to you - you lovely creatures!

I had my first major event yesterday - I spoke at Ingram - and a more wonderful group of people you can't ever hope to meet. They were fabulous - laughed in all the right places, made me feel like I sort of knew what I was talking about. I signed a ton of books and felt like maybe I could pull this off after all.

Because truly, if you're an introvert writer like me, you have a tendency to worry that you'll say or do something idiotic at just the wrong time. Hmm, is that introversion, or just being a geek?

The first time I talk about a book in public is terrifying. Terrifying. But it went really well. I was bummed that I didn't remember my very funny making anecdote until today.... but at least I'll have it for the rest of my talks. 

I'm off to create the newsletter, in which we will have a contest, and a prize, a simple one this time, but a prize nonetheless, and put together the photo slideshow, and... and... and....

And maybe, just maybe, I can sneak in some actual writing time this weekend. : )

Anything y'all are particularly interested in hearing about related to WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE? Ask away!