Things the Library Taught Me

by Eric

Last month I visited the library for the first time in a year to make copies of our tax forms. Years ago a week wouldn't have passed without my going to the library, let alone a year, but recently I've turned to e-books and never need to leave the house for reading material.

My grade school was a short walk from the local library and every week our teachers would have the class troop single file to the white wood frame building to exchange our borrowed books for new ones. That was my introduction to libraries and over the years they taught me a lot, quite apart from a love for reading.

Even during my picture book phase those weekly school excursions weren't sufficient. Saturday mornings it wasn't uncommon for me to trek from home to the library to stock up on Dr Seuss and the like, exhaust my selections by afternoon and return for more. Unfortunately the walk to the library was close to a mile with steep hills at both ends. I greedily piled up books until I had far too many to carry under one skinny arm, and nearly too many to see over cradled in both arms. I staggered outside, nose more or less resting on a Lorax or Horton the elephant. My thick lensed glasses kept slipping down as I stumbled along, more and more slowly, arms beginning to ache from the weight of all those delightful flights of imagination. Thus I learned about one's reach exceeding one's grasp.

When I was on fourth grade I learned about censorship. I had read all the Tom Swift Junior books my parents had bought for me and desperately craved more science fiction. (Instead of a monkey on my back I had an alien). Unfortunately the science fiction section of the library was upstairs in what must once have been a small bedroom. It was adults only. Apparently certain science fiction, including juveniles by Andre Norton and Lester del Rey, were unsuitable for young minds. Maybe an irate parent had shown them Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, or else someone didn't think kids should be reading about futures that held out the possibility of things being different than they are. Luckily, before long my parents were able to straighten out the strait-laced librarian and I was no longer barred from reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 which condemned book burning, and plenty of other science fiction which railed against the suppression of knowledge and freedom.

Speaking of freedom, libraries also gave me a foretaste of the surveillance state and not just via science fiction. Are you old enough to remember when library books had borrowing cards in a pocket on the inside back cover? You'd sign and date them when you took a book out. It was interesting to see how many times the book had been borrowed, when, and by whom. But at the library I went to this system also allowed the librarians to keep track of how many books each patron had borrowed. Which one time led to the librarian checking my books out to admonish me that I ought to read more. My classmate Nancy C----- had read twice as many books as I had! Despite the great loads of books I'd lugged home. What can I say? As a girl Nancy was not obligated to spend hours of potential reading time with friends reenacting the Gunfight at the OK Corral with cap guns.

The library also taught me not to lose my head in financial dealings. No, I didn't read books of investment advice while growing up (nor since). Rather I went to the annual library auction with a buddy. Usually what attracted me to the fund raiser were the food vendors and used book tables but one year the big speakers by the auction platform in front of the barn blared out that the next item up for bid was a trio of hamsters. My friend and I excitedly counted our pocket change and immediately began bidding furiously. Against each other. Solely against each other. Who other than a ten year old wants three hamsters? I guess we were naive but the whole point of an auction is bidding. What's the fun if you don't bid? Not surprisingly we eventually exhausted our funds and took our furry little prizes to my friend's house. We'd agreed to share custody and trade them back and forth. But I never got to keep them at my place.They turned out to be a bad investment because they got along worse than the Three Stooges. The next morning one was eviscerated and one decapitated. The survivor of the fight (I suppose he would have been Moe) we set loose in the woods. God help the chipmunks.

So I learned a lot from libraries but today I sit here typing electronic words which you'll read off a screen. I can't help remembering lurching homeward, gasping for breath, legs trembling, under the burden of those picture books and thinking that maybe books that weigh nothing are not a bad idea.

bookreporter interview

At bookreporter -- Author Talk Mary explains how we connected with the Press, the amount of research that goes into recreating the world of Byzantium in the sixth century, and the inner workings of our collaboration process.

What Makes a Book Cover Stand Out?

At AnneLouiseBannon.com Mary ponders what makes a book cover pop, stand out, make you want to buy? Read Mary's survey of book covers.

The Problem with Self Promotion

The Guardian Stones is an exciting departure for us. Set in the UK during WWII, a much different period than our Byzantine mysteries, it is also different in tone, darker perhaps, owing as much to the modern thriller as the Golden Age Detectives.

Naturally we want people to read the novel and so, already we have been dutifully attempting to bring it to people's attention. Unfortunately, although promotion is necessary, neither Mary nor I are very comfortable with it. If only Eric Reed were a real person who loved being a salesman.

In his memoir Self Consciousness John Updike described well the plight of diffident writers:

"...the price that we pay, we Americans who shyly wish to live by our eyes and wits, at our desks, away from the frightening tussle of human strength and appetite and intimidation and persuasiveness, is marginality: we live chancily, on society's crumbs in a sense, as an exchange for our exemption from the broad brawl of, to give it a name, salesmanship."

Ain't it the truth!

For most of us, although not, perhaps, for John Updike.

You're not exactly marginalized when you're on the cover of Time magazine, twice. But Updike's fame arrived in the early sixties and I would prefer to believe that back then success sought authors out because of their writing, that Updike had only sell stories and novels, and not himself. Or not to the extent that he would have had to sell himself were he beginning his career today.

How will literature change when an author cannot attain publication without without becoming a salesman? Surely our personalities are reflected in our books. A hard driving, competitive self promoter (the sort of person help wanted ads seek) perfectly at home in Updikes's "frightening tussle of human strength and appetite" is going to write a different kind of book than a person who is retiring and meditative.

Not that retiring and meditative writers have ever fared very well against the literary self-promoters but at least they were not entirely cut off from publication, which might soon be the case.

From a business point of view it isn't surprising. The financial returns from even a bestselling author like Updike amount to crumbs compared to the obscene mountains of money available from the more profitable businesses owned by the corporate conglomerates who control big publishing. Those who read books regularly have become a shrinking minority on the margins of society. Certainly not a market important enough to cultivate.

Nevertheless, some lesser-promoters will doubtless continue to write because for us there is almost no price too high for an exemption from salesmanship. Some of us still aspire to be Arthur Miller rather than Willy Loman.

Be Careful What You Wish For

by Eric

Poisoned Pen Press published our first mystery novel, One for Sorrow, in December 1999. When The Guardian Stones appears in January, a few months after our eleventh Byzantine mystery, Murder in Megara, the press will have released twelve of our books in a little more than fifteen years. We've been fortunate that a respected indie publisher has stuck with us for so long.

When Mary and I were sending our fifty page sample around, back in the days when publishers would consider unagented books, an editor at a big New York publisher evinced keen interest. Unfortunately we had made the rookie mistake of submitting a partial before we completed the book. A few months later, when we sent the entire MS, we were surprised and disappointed to receive a curt rejection.

Oddly, the pages the editor enthused over were by far the weakest part of the book. Eventually we rewrote the initial chapter about five times to make it acceptable and years later, when we refreshed the novel for the e-edition we trashed the original beginning entirely. Why had the editor's mind changed? The short, dismissive rejection gave no clue so we'll never know.

So what if our work had been published initially by one of the the big publishers?

It might seem obvious that it would have boosted our writing career immensely, but in hindsight I doubt it would have been a good thing. Probably we would have had two or three Byzantine mysteries published before getting the boot for failure to hit the bestseller lists immediately. That is the fate of most first time, unknown authors. We heard personally from one author whose "three book deal" was cancelled before the second book hit the shelves. Big publishers have no patience. Being part of corporate conglomerates they are about the bottom line rather than books.

Poisoned Pen Press, on the other hand, has given us the chance to continue writing novels and see them published..

Not to say I still don't wish we could, even just for a single book, make "The Show" as baseball players call the major leagues. But sometimes you need to be careful what you wish for.

One for Sorrow (Revised edition)

Our Handmade Website

by Eric

It's axiomatic that writers must have websites. When Mary and I saw our first novel, One for Sorrow published in 1999 we already possessed a website, left over from the mid-nineties when it was axiomatic that everyone on the Internet must have what was then called a homepage. I simply added a book cover and some reviews to turn our homepage into the required authors' page. With a few fresh coats of html paint it remains our rambling home on the web today. Visitors intrepid enough to explore dusty corridors and open creaking doors can find pages untouched in more than twenty years.

In 1995 html seemed like magic. By keyboarding simple bits of gobbledegook even a middle-aged Liberal Arts major like me could arrange images and words on a page floating out there in cyberspace for all the world to see. Who would have guessed how useful those "<" and ">" keys would turn out to be?

Do-it-yourself simplicity doesn't last. Soon frames came along and javascript. Today .css (cascading style sheets for those at my level of sophistication) look more like programming language than the html I learned to write. No doubt, a site designed by an expert looks a lot slicker and probably works a little better than one handcoded in nineties html by an amateur.

I say expertly produced sites work only a little better because I am a believer in content and it is the words and images that contain the content, not the design. But not everyone thinks like me, and I suspect that poor or old fashioned or amateurish design discourages many people from looking at content.

All this occurred to me recently when I decided our website should be spruced up prior to the release of Murder in Megara In October and The Guardian Stones in January. For several days I studied .css and decided that unless I were willing to take a course in it (which I'm not) my version of a .css site would be no improvement on the crude html we already have. So I tidied up a bit, as much as it is possible to tidy up html written in 1995 by someone who barely knew what he was doing.

But why not hire a professional? How many authors produce and maintain their own web pages? Not many, as far as I can tell.

We're not trying to pinch pennies. It's just that twenty years ago I loved the idea that anyone could put up their own web pages, without assistance, and I still feel that way. And why interpose a professional web master between ourselves and readers? Heck, we've kept plenty of personal essays on the site, most written long before we had mystery novels published. Do they give the site an amateur feel? I doubt they have any value from a marketing point of view.

Maybe our site is just my small revolt against the obsession with slick presentation and the rush to appear more professional than thou. Yes, I prefer our books -- which people pay for -- to be produced in a professional manner. But can't we meet readers on the Internet more informally?

Mary and I hope our website might be of more interest to some readers than the typical author's site. If nothing else it's a museum quality example of Grandma Moses style html circa 1995, still crammed with old stuff, an electronic attic. Who doesn't like to rummage through an attic?

Our Website

Waiting for that First Review

by Eric

Did you hear the huge sigh of relief coming from Casa Maywrite? It blew squirrels out of the pine trees at the end of the yard. The first review of Murder in Megara is just in from Kirkus Reviews and it's excellent.

"...combines historical detail with a cerebral mystery." -- Kirkus Reviews, July 15.

Thank Mithras for that, as our detrective, John, might say.

No matter how many books they've had published, regardless of good reviews in the past, the moment advance reading copies go out for review, authors are seized by the chilling certainty that the new book will not be liked by anyone. No, not even one reader. Not even one reviewer. Not a single person on the face of the planet. Well, at least that's the way this co-author feels. I can't speak for Mary.

After months of writing and revision, waiting for a reaction is agonizing. Like performing on stage and not knowing whether the audience will applaud or boo until weeks later.

I miss the days when I could show my handwritten literary efforts -- with full color crayola illustrations in a first edition printing of one -- to my parents without fear of a negative response.

True, my dad sometimes told me what he told his school students: "Interesting...." Meaning he didn't like it but didn't want to say so.

Mary and I are particuarly pleased to get a good review from Kirkus since when they don't like a book they usually have a lot different way of expressing it than "interesting."

So finally we can relax.

But wait! What if the Kirkus reviewer was the only person in the whole world who likes Murder in Megara? Which, now that I think of it, is almost surely the case!

Now we're on pins and needles anxiously awaiting the second review. Or I am. Mary, maybe not. She must be on pins though, surely, even if not needles too. But don't take my word for it.

Read the whole Kirkus review