Blending in with a Cult?
August 30, 2011
Guilty Pleasures
May 9, 2011
Much like the dining room table that has needed to be refinished for ten years. And don’t even get me started on the sorry condition of the chairs. Back to the bookshelf. Those newspapers are made of lovely old paper. And Kona eats paper. It covers it with mildew. It sends silverfishes scurrying in. It dispatches geckoes to poop on it. And I have recklessly brought those newspapers here.I try to keep them safe. I store them in a blue archival box recommended by a friend who sets up museum exhibits (nice job at the California Academy of Sciences, BTW, Pixie!). It’s acid free and protects against gecko poop and maybe silverfish.
.
I have a dehumidifying box in there that has magic crystals that suck the moisture out of the air to protect the paper from mildew. But when I took the box down for these pictures, the indicator crystal had changed from friendly blue to poisonous pink.
It’s in the oven now, having the moisture backed out of it, but how long was it pink? What evil befell the newspapers during the weeks it might have sat there, flashing out a pink beacon of despair?
.
I don’t know. But I know it’s all my fault.
What’s on my reference shelf? Not just dust!
March 15, 2011

Sorry for the lateness of today’s post. I just got back from the Tucson Festival of Books and collapsed in an exhausted, dried up husk instead of writing my blog post.
Today’s topic? What’s on my reference shelf? I have all the standard writing books on the writing shelf to the left of the dresser, the one that’s covered with necklaces that I forgot to put away and dust dunnies and a valentine from my son with a bug on it. Titles include: Elements of Style (Strunk and White), The Hero’s Journey (Christopher Vogler), Save the Cat (Blake Snyder, and yes I know it’s formulaic, but some of the advice is still damn good), Romancing the A-list (Christopher Kean), The Joy of Writing Sex (Elizabeth Benedict, but it’s still not joyful and I cannot write sex scenes at Starbucks because I’m that much of a prude).
Then I have all the titles that are specific to what I write: Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William Shirer), Blood and Banquets (Bella Fromm), I Will Bear Witness (Victor Klemperer), Voluptuous Panic (Mel Gordon, and the pictures are so racy that I hide it under my archival box of newspapers), bound editions of Berlin Illlustrierte Zeitung from 1931 plus one from 1934, BZ anniversary edition to 1986, Lenya (Donald Spoto), What I Saw (Joseph Roth), Counterfeit Spy (Sefton Delmer, and yes it was expensive because it’s out of print so I didn’t let myself buy it until I sold my book), plus more.
My thesaurus fell apart, so I use thesaurus.com and dictionary.com (although they put a bunch of tracking cookies on your computer, and are, in fact the worst offender when it comes to building an online profile of you according to the Wall Street Journal). I also love Online Etymology Dictionary because they give great histories of words. They’re by no means complete, but what they do have is fascinating! I also spend a lot of time at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and YouTube has an amazing collection of videos of Berlin in the 1930s is you poke around a bit.
For my upcoming novel, A GAME OF LIES, I spent a lot of time reading the 1,500 page official report of the 1936 Olympics. It’s in two volumes. One is here. Volume Two is here.
Yes, I’m in touch with my inner research nerd.
Dump the body
January 31, 2011
Brainstorming
August 17, 2010
Brainstorming techniques?
I think I may be the only writer I know without a file of cool ideas
tucked away and I’m starting to feel worried about it. I could throw
one together, but I don’t think I’d ever look at it again. For me, each
novel exists only as I’m writing it. I never go back through old ideas.
My process isn’t that straightforward, sadly.
First place I look for ideas? History. When I read about a
historical event or find the perfect quote from a historical
character, I know that I have to put it into a book. I can
research for hours and claim it is all background and plot
ideas. And it is! See that great picture? Tamara de Lempicka
painted it. She's a Polish Art Deco painter and I managed to
sneak her work into "A Night of Long Knives." Research...
Second place? OK, this sounds odd, but I make myself make a
list of ten ways to solve whatever story problem I’m having.
Ten. No more, no fewer. Sometimes the best idea is number one
and sometimes it’s number ten, but usually it’s somewhere in the middle. But making myself
do ten lets me give myself permission to throw nine ideas away, which is very freeing.
Still not working? Then I write on paper instead of typing. After a couple of pages of
that kind of torture my subconscious usually throws something out in a desperate attempt
to save me from having to decipher my own handwriting.
If that doesn’t work, I draw diagrams on paper with big circles and arrows or stick
stuff on index cards and put it on a board in my room while muttering and trying not
to step on the pushpins that somehow always end up on the floor.
If all else fails: I go see a movie and eat popcorn and chocolate. Even
if that doesn’t solve the story problem, at least I got tasty snacks in
air conditioned splendor. Did I mention that I love this job?







