Guest Author: William S. Shepard

Diplomacy and wine, who can resist? I'm pleased to have William Shepard join me again to talk about his diplomatic mysteries. So this is my holiday treat for my blog readers. Happy Holidays!

Diplomacy and Wine

William S. Shepard

www.diplomaticmysteries.com

I was a career diplomat in the American Foreign Service, and served at our Embassies in Singapore, Saigon, Budapest and Athens, retiring as Consul General in Bordeaux. “Write about what you know,” is the usual advice given writers, and for me, that was the Embassy world. During one of my five Washington tours, I found myself staying late one late evening, as Duty Officer for the Secretary of State. I perused the files and diplomatic cables, and then realized what a variety of information from all sources a diplomat has access to. That is when the idea came to my – when I retired, I would write mystery stories set in American Embassies overseas.

It is a new genre, and to my knowledge I am the only writer writing what I call “diplomatic mysteries.” It now have a series of four, and my protagonist, Robbie Cutler, is a thirty something career diplomat. He serves where I have served, and where necessary, I have gone back overseas for research purposes.

The first novel, “Vintage Murder,” is set in Bordeaux. The bad guys are the Basque ETA terrorist group, who attempt to raise money by terrorism the great vineyards of the region. In “Murder On The Danube,” Robbie has been reassigned to the American Embassy in Budapest. Someone is killing prominent visiting Americans, in order to keep his secret, that he was a traitor to the Hungarian Freedom Fighter cause during the Hungarian Revolution.

Robbie is intelligent and knowledgeable, but he is not a people person. His sister, and then his wife Sylvie, often have a better feeling for people and their motives than he does. Readers like them both, but many prefer Uncle Seth, Robbie’s great uncle, a nationally prominent man, once Time Magazine’s Man Of The Year, who has access to Washington intelligence circles.

Where did the names come from? “Robbie” is a family name, and Cutler was my mother in law’s maiden name. I had an Uncle Seth, whom I just remember, and Seth is my middle name. Bad guys? They are all sorts, but they are not one dimensional. The ETA gunman in the first novel was motivated by a police killing of a member of his family. The bad guy in the second novel believes (incorrectly) that one of his fellow Freedom Fighters murdered his brother.

As I said, this is an original mystery genre. As the President of the American Foreign Service put it in a cover blurb, “London has Sherlock Holmes and San Francisco has Sam Spade, and now Washington has its first diplomatic sleuth, Robbie Cutler. Learn about embassy life from the inside, as you enjoy Bill Shepard’s latest diplomatic mystery.” You’ll have an enjoyable read in the process!

But diplomacy and wine go well together, as I discovered during my residence in Bordeaux. The 2011 Kindle edition of my book on French wines, “Shepard’s Guide to Mastering French Wines,” has just been issued. It costs less than one-third of the 2003 print first edition! And there are new features, including dozens of hyperlinks that take the reader from the book to websites of the great French wine estates! There are even e-mail forms embedded into many links, so that if you are actually thinking of planning your own overdue trip to France, you can send an e-mail directly from the book to the wine estate you wish to visit, and request the appointment to taste the estate’s wines!

Writing this wine book was a labor of love, and it grew out of my visits to the vineyards in Bordeaux. But we also went to Burgundy, Alsace, Champagne, the Rhone and Loire Valleys, to sample the wines and form judgments as to which wines were of fine quality and still offered the best value for the American consumer. Since returning to the USA I have become Wine Editor for two websites, with over 150 columns on French wines published on the internet.

It should be an easy errand for the purchaser of this book, at $5.95, to save more than the book’s cost with the first wine purchase made with its help. The two diplomatic mysteries are just $2.99 each.

And since all three books are now on Kindle Select, anyone enrolled in that program can borrow one of these books at no cost! That may just be why the wine book has been my best selling book for the holiday season.

Did you know that you can send one of these Kindle books as a gift to a friend? Just click on the “gift” button, and you’ll be linked with the e-mail message that you can fill out for a lucky friend! That’s also turning out to be a popular holiday season option.

And here are the links for these three books -
Vintage Murder
Murder On The Danube
Shepard’s Guide to Mastering French Wines

Bio
Now residents of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the Shepards enjoy visits from their daughters and granddaughters, fine and moderate weather, ocean swims at Assateague, Chesapeake Bay crabs, and the company of Rajah and Rani, their two rescued cats.

Prize winning mystery writer William S. Shepard is the creator of a new genre, the diplomatic mystery, whose plots are set in American Embassies overseas. That mirrors Shepard’s own career in the Foreign Service of the United States, during which he served in Singapore, Saigon, Budapest, Athens and Bordeaux, in addition to five Washington tours of duty.

His books explore this rich, insider background into the world of high stakes diplomacy and government. He evokes his last Foreign Service post, Consul General in Bordeaux, in Vintage Murder, the first of the series of four “diplomatic mysteries.” The second, Murder On The Danube, now also available on Kindle, mines his knowledge of Hungary and the 1956 Revolution. In Murder In Dordogne Robbie Cutler, his main character, is just married, but their honeymoon in the scenic southwest of France is interrupted by murders. The most recent of the series, The Saladin Affair, has Cutler transferred to work for the Secretary of State. Like the author, Cutler arranges trips on Air Force Two – now enlivened by serial Al Qaeda attempts to assassinate the Secretary of State.

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Thank you so much and I hope folks take advantage of the holidays to check out gifting, or the pleasure of reading, your books!

May you have a warm, cheery holiday season and a bright New Year!

Guest Author: Charles Rosenberg

Remember the move, The Paper Chase? Or shows like LA Law and Boston Legal? Perry Mason? We've all been thrilled by courtroom drama and intrigues by lawyers (despite the jokes about them) and I'm honored to interview Charles Rosenberg, a gifted writer and lawyer.

Charles Rosenberg
Why did you decide to write?
After having been the legal script consultant to four TV shows – The Paperchase, LA Law, The Practice and Boston Legal, plus having been one of two on-air analysts for E! TV’s coverage of the O. J. Simpson criminal and civil trials, writing Death on a High Floor, which is a legal thriller, just seemed a natural thing to do. Although the truth is that I started a similar novel in the mid-70’s, but never finished it. So maybe it all started back then.

How much research do you do?
Didn’t have to do any research, really, on what life is like inside very large law firms since I spent a significant part of my life as a lawyer inside such firms (although I want to be sure to point out that none of them was as mean as Marbury Marfan, the firm in Death on a High Floor). Nor did I have to do much research on criminal procedure since I taught that subject as a law professor once-upon-a-time, have represented clients in criminal matters (although they involved white collar federal prosecutions rather than murders) and, of course, watched every minute of the Simpson murder trial plus a couple of others. So all I had to do was brush up a bit on current California criminal procedure. As for ancient Roman coins, which play a key role in the plot, I collect such coins (in a minor kind of way), and I own all of the books that are referred to in the novel. So that research was done from my own book shelves. I did have to learn a bit more, though, about the particular coin in the book – the EID MAR (Ides of March) denarius of Brutus—the coin Brutus minted to celebrate his assassination of Julius Caesar, complete with double daggers and the Latin words EID Mar (Ides of March) on the back. That research I was able to do on the Internet. Other than that, it was just odds and ends Internet research.

What was the most interesting thing you discovered when you were doing your research?
That counterfeit ancient coins are even more common than I thought. Indeed, I discovered that some forgeries were so good that there are people who collect them.
(Note from Amy: I had no idea people collected forged coins, but I can see why. Many are works of art and show real talent on the part of the forgers. Makes you wonder what they could accomplish if they set their mind to doing real work. :) )

What’s your favorite method for researching?
The Internet, particularly things like Google Scholar.

Do you have a favorite theme or message for your readers?
Hmm. I think I’d like people to take from the novel that circumstantial evidence of guilt doesn’t always mean that the person is guilty.

When do you write/what is your writing day like?
My life, because it involves continuing to be a full-time lawyer, as well as an adjunct law professor, is hard to plan from day to day. So I just write whenever/wherever I get the time. There is no standard “writing day” in my life. Might be nice if there were.

What is the best advice someone has given you about writing? The worst advice?
Best advice was: Finish it and then go back later and polish it. Worst advice: use an outline.

How do you approach a new book? Outlines? Just an idea?

Outlines work well for many people, I know. They just don’t for me. I approach a mystery just by asking myself who died, who did it and why. That provides, instantly, two characters (although the dead one doesn’t have much of a role). From there, it just develops as I write.

How do you develop your characters?
I think they develop organically through interactions with the other characters as I write them, mainly through dialogue. I’m a big believer in “show, don’t tell.” In some ways, I just start with a broad character outline. For example, the main criminal defense lawyer in Death on a High Floor is anti-technology: doesn’t own a computer or a cell phone. Once you have that down, the rest of his personality just flows from that—he’s something of a crank in everything. The ancient coin dealer, Serappo Prodiglia, is quirky, in part because I think that to be a dealer in ancient coins you have to be a bit quirky. Aren’t all antiquarians quirky in some way?

Who are your favorite authors? Have any authors inspired you or influenced your work?
I always have trouble with this question because I’d need to break it down into many categories, and name a favorite for each. In the thriller genre, I’ve always loved Frederick Forsyth, who wrote Day of the Jackal. Currently, in the area of novels that are more “literary,” I’m enamored of Hilary Mantel, who wrote Wolf Hall (the Man Booker Prize winner in 2009), among many other novels. In terms of true influence, though , I’d have to say it would be the non-fiction work by the late John Gardner, The Art of Fiction, Craft for Young Writers. I first read it when it came out in 1984, and it’s still full of good advice and insight.

What makes a great book in your opinion?
Being able to be absorbed in the fiction in so profound a way that you truly forget that the characters never really lived.

If a reader took away one thing from your book(s), what would you like that to be?
A sense of what it’s like, psychologically, to be accused of a crime you didn’t commit.

Do you have any tips for aspiring authors?
Just finish it!

Where do you see yourself as an author in five years?
I have a second novel that’s about 70% done (not a sequel) that I hope to finish in a couple of months. Then I plan a sequel to Death on a High Floor. And then there are some novels beyond that, one of which is a historical novel, and one of which is a sci-fi “space opera.” And I hope to be better known.  But what author does not?

Where do you see the publishing industry going in the next few years and where do you see yourself within this industry?
I’m sad to say (because I still like hard copy books, even though I now read most books on my Kindle) that print books, except for specialty items, are going away. As a result, large brick and mortar book retailers (like retailers of music) are going to be largely gone (Barnes & Noble lost a lot of money this year), and publishers are going to find themselves, like record companies, re-emerging in forms they can’t now quite envisage. There will also be, as with record companies, a lot more consolidation.

Bio
Charles B. (“Chuck”) Rosenberg has been the credited legal script consultant to three prime time television shows: L.A. Law, The Practice and Boston Legal, as well as The Paper Chase (Showtime). During the O .J. Simpson criminal trial, he was one of two on-air legal analysts for E! Entertainment Television’s live coverage of the trial. He also provided commentary for E!’s coverage of the Simpson civil trial. He is also the author of the book The Trial of O.J. Simpson: How to Watch the Trial and Understand What’s Really Going On (Publishing Partners 1994) and is a contributing author to the book Lawyers in Your Living Room! Law on Television (ABA Publishing 2009). He has taught extensively as an adjunct law professor, including at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, the Loyola Law School International LLM Program in Bologna, Italy, the UCLA School of Law, the Pepperdine School of Law, and the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA. A graduate of the Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, Chuck currently practices in the Los Angeles area. He has been a partner in several law firms, including a large international firm. Currently, he is a partner in a three-lawyer firm. Chuck and his wife have lived in Los Angeles since the early 1970s. He is at work on a second novel.

Website: http://charlesrosenberg.wordpress.com/  (with links to blog and the book’s Facebook page)

Book blurb
Death on a High Floor
Simon Rafer is the roundly hated managing partner of Marbuy Marfan, a glitzy Los Angeles law firm with more than a thousand lawyers scattered across four continents. Robert Tarza, a sixtyish, laid back senior partner who is waltzing toward retirement, has the misfortune to get in early one morning and find Rafer dead in the reception area, an elaborate dagger struck in his back. It’s not good to find the body, and it’s particularly not good if you seem to have a motive, to wit: Rafter had just bought a rare ancient Roman coin from Tarza for a cool half-million dollars, declared it a fake and was demanding his money back. LAPD homicide detective Spritz has his eyes fixed on Tarza from the start, and seems near to building an air tight case against him for Murder One. Jenna James, the kick-ass woman associate whom Tarza has mentored for seven years, wants to defend him. And Tarza likes the idea, because he finds himself falling apart and needs somebody who believes in him. But then again, maybe Jenna herself is the real killer . . .

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Thank you!

Vintage Murder - Real or Research?

Vintage Murder - Real or Research?

A Look Behind the Scenes

William S. Shepard, http://www.diplomaticmysteries.com/

The first book in my series of Diplomatic Mysteries is Vintage Murder (http://tinyurl.com/3unnas5 ). It is set largely in Bordeaux, where I lived for several years, and in Paris. Much of the detail depends upon my research and memory of the days that I lived there, as Consul General.

Here are some examples, The meetings described in the book that take place at the Embassy in Paris are quite genuine in tone, and mirror actual meetings of American diplomats who were assigned to diplomatic missions around France. The Bordeaux vineyards are also real, and most of them (except where blackmailing episodes take place) are amongst the most famous and pricey wine estates of that storied region. So, unfortunately, are the activities of the Basque ETA, a terrorist organization whose stated purpose is Basque nationhood.

My idea was to combine these elements. Now, fortunately, the ETA seems exhausted (although we have seen that before), and its fortunes at a low ebb. But what if they were to revive, motivated by the desire to be a real player, with large sums of money at their disposal rather than the small amounts of “taxes” which they extort from local Basque businessmen? That led me to the creation of my first character, a young Basque of keen intelligence and a burning desire for revenge. Here I inserted into his background an actual event, the formation of paramilitary hit squads by Spanish authorities, who crossed the border and carried out murders in France. Unfortunately, they fairly often hit the wrong targets and murdered innocent people. That was the case with the father of my main Basque character. (I don’t like cardboard villains very much. I like to understand their motivation and to the extent possible, make them three dimensional.)

Having invented this character, I had the idea of having him be a keen student. Why not have him with an American MBA? That would do several things – he would think of the ETA terrorists as a group with a failing business model. To have any chance of success (specifically, liberating the hundreds of their members in prison) they would need a great deal of money and weapons. And there, in Bordeaux, just a few hours away from the coastline, are world famous vineyards, some bottles of which sell for enormous prices. It would be a tempting blackmail prospect.

My American diplomat, Robbie Cutler, is the Consul at the same mission where I served. He surely knows some of the same people, and of course is enjoying their wines! But when he is contacted by a wine estate owner who claims that he is being blackmailed, the action takes an official turn for Cutler. Add to that the sign paingted on the door of the American Consulate General, “Death to the American Consul,” signed by the ETA!

Robbie is on his second assignment. His father was also a career diplomat, so living overseas is natural for Robbie. He has long since paid all of his official calls, so that when help is needed, he already knows the key players in the French police and intelligence services. He also has that rare quality that Napoleon is said to have demanded of his generals – he is lucky! And luck is presented in the person of the beautiful Sylvie Marceau, a features newspaper writer for the local regional newspaper, Sudouest. He is logical she is intuitive. She also discovers the first wine estate owner to be murdered by the ETA!

Robbie and Sylvie ramble through the most famous vineyards of Bordeaux, in St. Emilion, Pomerol, and the Médoc, where they attend a reception at storied Château Margaux. Their detection becomes a love story, and on a visit to Bordeaux, Robbie’s sister Evalyn tells her brother that now he is the lucky one – Sylvie is far too good for the likes of him!

Since this is the first book of a series, Robbie Cutler and Sylvie Marceau become continuing characters, as do several of their diplomatic colleagues. Cutler is reassigned from Bordeaux to Budapest at the end of Vintage Murder, during the second book in the series, Murder On The Danube, but he and Sylvie keep in touch, and become engaged. Their honeymoon, in Murder In Dordogne, gives Sylvie a chance to play detective as well, and she solves a murder plot of which her husband was totally unaware! Finally, the American Ambassador in Paris in Vintage Murder is so well connected politically that at the start of the fourth book in the series, The Saladin Affair, he is named Secretary of State, and Robbie becomes his Special Assistant, responsible for planning his trips overseas. Here his diplomatic duties are compounded by a murder investigation, and the repeated attempts of Al Qaida to murder the Secretary of State.

Shepard’s Guide to Mastering French Wines (http://tinyurl.com/6eldhbn )

My years in Bordeaux also led me to a second career in wine writing, as the Wine Editor of the travel group, French Wine Explorers. My latest column, published last week, concerns the wonderful 2009 Beaujolais vintage. (http://tinyurl.com/3exy47g ).

My Kindle book on French wines, revised and enlarged for this 2011 edition, introduces you to the wines and wine regions of France. With dozens of hyperlinks, the reader can click back and forth between the book and the actual websites of the great regions of Champagne, Bordeaux, and Burgundy. The 2009 and 2010 vintages are assessed, and there are many tips on quality wines that are reasonable priced. For the cost of a single glass of wine, here is your well-researched guide to the pleasures of French wines. Read this, and you’ll wonder why you ever relied on a point score rather than your own good taste!

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Thank you so much! My husband and I are just starting our efforts to learn about wine, so this was wonderfully serendipity to get a blog about this fascinating topic. We can't wait to learn more, and I, personally, can't resist a mystery with such an interesting premise as Vintage Murders.

What Compels You To Read?

What attracts you to a book? Why do you read?
Those questions are fascinating to me, and there are almost as many answers as there are blades of grass in the world.

For me, reading is a chance to explore other "modes of life," other cultures, discover new things, new words, vicarious thrills, see how others solve problems, and most of all, explore what it is that makes a human being tick.

Unlike a lot of readers, I avoid the heart-warming, the tear-jerkers, the super-woman heroines who weigh 90 lbs but stand 5'8" tall in fancy high-heels and tailored suits. Or the fun-loving hippy-chick who lets her emotions rule her beautiful life. I seek out the books about the overweight, the irrascible, the bitter cynics, misfits, the sarcastic, geeky, uncool loners who never fit in and know they probably never will. Those who like to think logic drives them but are often surprised at how many times obscure, deep-seated needs made the decisions for them. And they weren't good decisions.

Could it be that I bond more strongly with those I perceive to be like me? (I shudder to think what that says about me.) Or those who are portrayed with qualities I'd like to emulate? Is that part of what drives a reader to select certain books, certain authors over others? It's an interesting question and may in part help us understand why certain authors reach mega-stardom and others, who may even be better writers in the same genre, simply don't find a wide audience. Are the truly popular able to tap into the psyche of the "fat middle of the bell curve" of humanity (instead of the skinny ends), creating characters and incorporating themes that speak to most people?

To a large part, that may be true. The authors who can tap into the zeitgeist will undoubtedly do well.
For me, there are definitely values, themes, and characters that draw me into their stories and cause me to buy every book I can find about them.

The Inspector Rutledge series by Charles Todd, for example. This series of mysteries is set in England, right after World War I. It's a period when a shell-shocked population saw their world change forever in fundamental ways. The war itself was traumatic, but layered on top of that were changes brought about by technology. Cars were replacing horses, for example. Civilization was shifting into high gear. It was the start of an era we would recognize as the roots of our modern times.

While the shift is undoubtedly fascinating, what really draws me is Rutledge. This is a man who I can truly respect. He's been through horrific events during the war and returned home, shell-shocked and scarred both physically and mentally. His fiancee leaves him and his life is in tatters. And yet...instead of laying about whining, he returns to the work, hoping the challenges will give him time to pull himself together and heal. He shows enormous integrity and courage, as well as the drive to work through adversity instead of just giving up. He typifies all the qualities I admire most. He is why we will forever call those men and women who lived through the first half of the 20th century, the Great Generation. No one from that period would even think of eliminating cursive writing from school because it's too difficult to teach. (Okay, I had to add that, sorry.)

In contrast, I also read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson every year, sometimes twice a year. WARNING: SPOILERS. The main character draws me in as strongly as Rutledge and in many ways, she is much like him. She is also damaged and that damage leads her inexorably to her fate. I love the understated, vicarious chills of this horror story. There is no blood, no unspeakable acts of torture. It is more subtle and in may ways more horrible because of that. It is filled with irony. Eleanor is a character we can sympathize with, and perhaps even admire. She has sacrificed her own happiness and independence by spending most of her adult life taking care of an invalid mother. Exhausted by years of coming to her mother's call, day and night, she accidentally sleeps through one, final call. The one call that turns out to be the one she should have answered, for her mother dies. Ironic. And Eleanor can never quite forgive herself for that.

Then at last, she has one opportunity to find happiness and show her independence by taking her first vacation ever. At Hill House. Where whatever forces await her recognize that buried guilt and prey upon her. Her first attempt to find happiness, to show independence, results in...well. Ironic.

In contrast to that, are the works of P. G. Wodehouse. Particularly his stories set at Blandings Castle. Blandings Castle is the seat of Lord Emsworth. I adore Lord Emsworth. Mostly because he loathes his children, his family and only wants to be left alone to fatten up his champion sow, the Empress of Blandings. He makes me wonder how many parents really feel about their children, particuarly after said children reach the ages of around 13-25. I suspect Lord Emsworth isn't the only one who'd like to see them locked away and forgotten during that period. I wouldn't have blamed my own parents one bit if they felt like that. In fact, I can't understand how they avoided doing just that when I was in my teens.

As for my own writing...I find that I can't even start a book unless I have some pretty good conflict going and can include at least one irrascible, possibly down-right mean, character and a bit of comic relief. That's why so many of my stories end up with those elements somewhere around the middle when the going gets tough and I need a laugh or two to keep going.

My themes vary, but many have elements of "being trapped" in them, like Eleanor is trapped by her noble quality, her ability to sacrifice her happiness for others, and her guilt at failing her mother at the most critical moment. In my latest mystery, A Rose Before Dying, many of the characters are trapped in a variety of ways, both internally and externally.

Sir Edward is trapped by his lameness and circumstances. Someone may be trying to implicate him in a series of murders. In his efforts to extricate himself, he traps his nephew, Charles Vance, into investigating.

Charles Vance is trapped in a murder investigation by duty, a deep sense of honor and his love for his uncle.

As a woman in the early years of the 19th century, Ariadne Wellfleet is trapped by Society and legal obligations. She's engaged to be married to a man she does not like and restricted in her abilities to alter her situation for the better. She has a rose hybridization business she loves, but if she breaks her engagement she may lose it all.

This theme of entrapment is something I enjoy exploring, so I seem to return to it time and time again.

I'll leave you with two things: a question to ponder and a brief blurb for A Rose Before Dying.

What themes and characters intrigue you--why do you read?

And now...a word about A Rose Before Dying.

Only Sir Edward had the motive, the opportunity, and a garden full of the identical roses sent to each victim before their death.

The first victim was Sir Edward’s ex-mistress, a woman who threw him over for a younger man. After receiving a mysterious rose, she dies while alone with Sir Edward. Then a second rose is delivered and a deadly game commences, where roses are the only clues to save the next victim.

However, Charles Vance, Earl of Castlemoor, refuses to believe his uncle, Sir Edward, could commit the murders, even when the renowned head of the Second Sons Inquiry Agency warns him there may be some truth behind the rumors. "The roses are Sir Edward’s attempt to cast suspicion elsewhere." "Misdirection." Or so the whispers say.

Convinced he can prove his uncle’s innocence, Vance enlists the aide of notable rosarian, Ariadne Wellfleet, little realizing his actions will involve the Wellfleet household in the killer’s game.

Before the week is out, another rose is delivered.

Guest Author: Jim Franz

Please welcome Jim Franz, a mystery writer with a fascinating angle! I'm pumped to have him on the blog because we are both intrigued by the human mind and "what makes us tick". For good or bad, we both had psychologists in the family, which means endless discussions about nature versus nurture, not to mention experimentation in the realm of parenting. My mother was an ardent follower of Skinner's behavior modification techniques, so the less said about that, the better. LOL

I'm a fan of mysteries where the hero or heroine faces the challenge of a psychological disorder. After all, it's what made Monk on television such a compelling character. But I won't babble on about why psychology interests me...

Here's Jim!

World Without Faces

Although the main character in World Without Faces is fictional, the disorder he has is very real. It's called prosopagnosia, and it's a neurological condition in which people can't recognize faces.


Imagine going to school or work and being unable to tell who anybody is. You'd never be able to recognize anyone at a supermarket or a high school sports event, nor meet up with friends at a restaurant.

Speaking of friends, how would you make them? If you have a good conversation with somebody at work, the gym, or at a school function, how would you know who they are if you ever wanted to spot them again? How would you maintain that relationship?

Maybe you're thinking we could always ask our husbands or our wives who people are; they cover for us now, anyway! But how would you meet your husband or wife? How would you date? Imagine meeting somebody at a wedding or a party, and you're attracted to them, and they're funny, and things are going well. Then they say they're going to get something to drink, or maybe you're supposed to get the drinks, or one of you has to go to the bathroom. The moment they're out of your sight, you can no longer tell who they are. Will you go up to random people, ask them if you've been hitting it off for the past twenty minutes?

A major problem that people with prosopagnosia face is that they're not blind. It doesn't seem to make sense, does it? How is not being blind a problem? The problem is that the condition is neurological, so other people have no idea about the disorder and will not make allowances for it. If you actually were blind, people would say, "Hey, it's Alex, I'm back." But if you're not blind and you don't acknowledge Alex in a special way, then Alex may feel blown off, and there goes the potential relationship.

Would you tell new people about it? How well do you think that conversation would go? Prosopagnosia is almost completely unknown outside of the medical community. Indeed, unless you're speaking to a neurologist or neuropsychologist, most doctors don't even know it exists. Would a new acquaintance think it makes you sound interesting or that it makes you sound like a freak?

There are tricks people with prosopagnosia can use, and they may not be what you think. Sometimes you can recognize a person's voice, but that only works when the person is talking to you and if their voice is somehow distinctive. Sometimes the person is wearing something unusual or extreme. (There's no research on the subject, but I have a feeling that even people with prosopagnosia can spot Lady Gaga in a crowd!)

In the example of finding somebody again at a party, you might describe the person to yourself by saying something like, "She's 30 years old, brunette with shoulder-length hair, and is wearing black slacks with a white top." If that description matches only one person in the room, then you'll find her. If you see somebody else matching that description, though, you're likely to make a fool out of yourself. If she put on a jacket while you were away, you're done for.

This is the world my main character lives in. Every student, every teacher, every potential friend and enemy are unidentifiable. Worse, he witnesses a murder that he feels compelled to solve. But even if you lived a normal life with prosopagnosia, hopefully without any murders, how would you function day-to-day?

If you'd like to read more about World Without Faces or are interested in psychology topics in general, please check out my website at http://www.jim-franz.com/ .

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Thank you, Jim. I hope others find that as compelling as I have.

Amazon Publishing on the Kindle, Redux

Indie Publishing, Who'd Have Thunk It?
A quick blog, a few random thoughts on independent (indie) publishing, mostly centered on the Kindle...

I admit it, I never thought I'd give in to the lure of indie publishing. If nothing else, I'm a firm believer in the search for excellence and traditionally, excellence in publishing meant the whole agent/NY publishing thing.

Got a couple of agents, got a few books published, but they languished. I languished. I considered giving up, calling it quits, admitting that I was the one loser out of the group of six starry-eyed writers striving to be published who all went on to bigger and much better contracts.

But I'm stubborn, and I had all these books in my head dying to get out, and what the heck?

Then I started reading Konrath's blog. Things exploded in the indie world. Like an idiot, I realized that once again, I was behind the curve on something I should have been at least one step ahead of. I mean, I have a day job in the computer industry. I should have realized what was going on, much, much sooner.

Nonetheless, I finally took the plunge a few months ago. It has been a totally eye-opening experience in ways I really didn't expect.

Serendipity is alive and well and nesting in my Kindle.

What happened?

Well, I had a mystery (The Vital Principle) that I was talking to a publisher about, but the advance was small and I realized, well, if the book was good enough to be published, wasn't it good enough to be indie published? After more work, of course.

So I did.

A couple of months later, I'm doing...quite well. Not burning up the Internet, but nice, solid sales. In the meantime, I had another book I'd written and was almost ready to go. I got it ready and indie published that one (A Rose Before Dying). Again, nice solid sales. Enough so that I've now set into motion plans to retire early and write full time.

Then...serendipity.

My trad books? They're starting to sell. With virtually no effort on my part (except, of course, I'm working on my next book which is a LOT of effort).

It's the reverse of what I had expected. I had expected traditionally published books to drive the sales of my indie books. What is happening is that my indie books are driving the sales of my trad books.

Is this some weird thing unique to me? No clue. No clue AT ALL.

But I will say this: writing the best book you can write is worth it. And the best advertising is your next book.

Finally, let me talk about a related subject that is near to my heart. Amazon rankings. If you're an author, you may be as addicted as I am to the rankings watch.

But what do they really mean?

It's all relative, my dear.

For a full and comprehensive discussion on Amazon rankings, I encourage you to look at the following link: Amazon Ranks Explained. In a nutshell, the rank is how well your book is selling that hour against all the other books on Amazon. It's calculated hourly.

While that link does a wonderful job of explaining the ranking system, the rank data is from 2008. I took my own data from 2011 and updated the table slightly to reflect the more recent information. Here's how the ranks roughly (and I mean ROUGHLY) break down as they relate to sales.

RANK                         Weekly Sales - 2011
    1,000                            210 copies (~30/day)
    5,000                            100 copies (~16/day)
  10,000                              70 copies (~10/day)
 100,000                             20 copies (~ 3/day)
 300,000                             15 copies (~ 2/day)
 500,000                               1 copy
1,000,000                             1 or 2 copies/month

Keep in mind a few things:

1. This is relative to all the other books being sold, so if book sales are really slow across the board, the number of copies sold to earn a ranking will be less & vice versa.
2. Huge jumps in rank within an hour, e.g. going from 114,000 to 44,000, doesn't mean you're selling between 3 and 10 copies that day or even that hour. It means that you may have sold one copy that hour, which was more than those above the 44,000 rank did, but less than those with lower ranks. For that specific hour.
3. It's the average ranking for an entire week that may give you the best clue for your sales that week.

You really can't tell for sure what your sales are without getting the details, but if you're an author who has to wait for his or her publisher to release the figures, this at least gives you a swag number.

If you're an indie author, then of course you can check the daily numbers (like I do) from Amazon DTP. But it's still fun to look at rankings.

Best wishes for success!

Guest Author: William S. Shepard

First, I need to apologize to William for messing up his blog date. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. No excuses--especially since he sent me the blog ages in advance and I was really looking forward to it. But enough wringing of hands. Here he is!

Research and Mystery Writing

William S. Shepard

http://www.diplomaticmysteries.com/

The advice given writers is to write about what they know, and it is sound advice. For myself, as a former career diplomat, it meant creating a new mystery genre, the diplomatic mystery. My series of four Robbie Cutler novels is set largely in American Embassies overseas, where I have served and lived for years.

That doesn’t mean, I quickly found out, that an overseas location is easy to write about or to recall. For one thing, one’s memory begins to play tricks. Was that restaurant really on the hilly Buda side of the Danube, or in downtown Pest? For another thing, history is a moving target. It doesn’t stay still at all, particularly in areas where the politics are volatile.

My novel “Murder On The Danube,” for example, is set in Budapest.

It is set in the present time, with flashbacks to the Hungarian Revolution against Russian occupation. Someone is killing people now, to stop the past from being found out.

This made for interesting research. When I was assigned to the American Embassy in Budapest it was during the communist years, when the Hungarian Revolution was officially a nonevent, so it was impossible to do solid research. After the Berlin Wall came down, and with the assistance of both the Hungarian Embassy in Washington and the American Embassy in Budapest, I returned, did research for the book, and even lectured at the official 1956 Historical Institute.
Now that would be impossible, for the Institute no longer exists. The 1956 Historical Institute was defunded, some say because its files may have contained embarrassing information about presently powerful people! History tends to wobble around still, like that Budapest park filled with old statues of the Stalinist era!
In creating a back story for the Hungarian Revolution itself I was faced with difficult choices. Put in too much, and the back story intrudes. Too little, and it would seem shallow. I even put the problem to a creative writing class that I was teaching at the time! Finally the solution came. The thirteen days of turmoil are well known, and so I wrote thirteen chapters, each with a back story that contained some highlights of that day in the fighting, with clues as to the present murderer. This format succeeded, and a high compliment came from a friend who was himself a Freedom Fighter in those days. He said that his teenage son read the book, and then said “I read ‘Murder On The Danube,’ and now I understand what you and Mother went through!”

Let me mention also my latest ebook, “ Maryland in the Civil War.” 

It arose out of my lectures on that subject at Chesapeake College and Washington College, Maryland. This is the 150th anniversary of those events, and some of the background, for example how Maryland stayed in the Union, is little known today. But I soon discovered the truth of Faulkner’s axiom, from Requiem For A Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I found for example that fifty years ago, the centennial of the Civil War was marked by state observances. There arose an issue of whether to tell the story of John Brown’s 1859 raid at Harper’s Ferry. Some feared that the entire centennial observance might unravel if publicity were given to Brown’s exploits!

I have found unexpected richness in this topic. The courage of Governor Thomas Hicks, for example, is virtually unknown today. Sort of a Maryland Harry Truman, he was a Dorchester County farmer, who was elected by the Know-Nothing anti-immigrant party. Then Maryland was overwhelmed by the grand issue of whether to secede. Faced with a largely pro-secessionist state legislature, Hicks stalled and played a major role in ensuring that the state stayed in the Union. Had she not done so, of course, Washington would have been totally surrounded by the Confederacy, and the outcome might have been very different. It is a gripping story, one that I was thrilled to discover and write about. And of course the story was not one sided. At Gettysburg on the third day of the battle, Maryland units faced each other, and at Culp’s Hill, the opposing color sergeants were two cousins from Trappe, Talbot County, Maryland!

The richness and confusion of history is worth exploring. I hope you will share the excitement of that research, in “Murder On The Danube,” and “Maryland In Thed Civil War.”

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Thanks!
One of the reasons I was so fascinated by this is that I grew up in Maryland and have visited Gettysburg, Harper's Ferry, and have had several wonderful trips to Russia, so it really resonated with me. I hope you'll enjoy these mysteries as much as I do!