Alison Kent's Blah Blog

For the first time ever, I’m working on a story that won’t tell me how it ends. This isn’t really a big deal. I plan to write it through, see what happens. But I need to write a synopsis soon, and that’s a real impossibility when so much of where the book will go is up in the air. I haven’t faced this before. Everything I’ve written in the past – romance – has had a built in resolution. Girl gets boy AND a happy ending.

The current WIP isn’t going to be so nicely wrapped up. There are any number of directions these characters can go, and the ending, though neat and tidy, isn’t going to come as easily as a straight genre romance. Yes, this book has a major romance subplot, but how it wraps up is going to depend on the twists and turns the main plot takes. I haven’t faced this before. It’s kinda fun, but it’s also kinda scary, all unfamiliar territory, a big bad scary leap into the unknown. A leap of faith that’s been a tough one to make.

I like familiarity. Not the part about it breeding contempt . . . but, I get where that comes from. The same thing over and over can get old. Very old. And stale. And boring. But I like familiarity because it’s easy. Not easy in that there’s no work involved in writing a genre novel, but because the genre formula (and, yes, there is a formula) means the writing will go a certain way each and every time.

What makes genre novels unique is the voices of the authors, their take on the formula, the spins they put on girl meets boy – girl loses boy – girl finds boy that keep the reader turning the pages. But there comes a time when the muse wants to tweak the familiar, and that might just take the book out of genre and put it into the expansive seas of commercial fiction not so easily defined. That’s pretty scary, but in the end, I’ve got my fingers crossed that it’ll be totally worth the angst!

Bizarre and cryptic messages found on a pair of corpses in Mobile, Alabama, launch junior police detective Carson Ryder and veteran cop Harry Nautilus into a desperate search for a mysterious killer. With the body count rising, Ryder descends into his family’s terrifying past by seeking advice from his brother, a violent, taunting psychopath convicted of similarly heinous crimes. Ryder soon confronts not only his past fears and nightmares, but also the knowledge that someone he knows is the next target.

And time is running out.

In my post about the books I’d pre-ordered for the year, Lisa suggested I try Jack Kerley, an author I’d never heard of before. The Hundredth Man was my first book of his to read. It won’t be my last. Right up front I need to say this is not a romance by any means, though there’s a small romance subplot (putting that out there since I know many of you read only romance), and though the book is suspense, it’s also borderline psychological horror, very graphic, very gory, very gross. And VERY good.

Here’s a piece of the Publisher’s Weekly review that recaps the plot.

First-time author Kerley debuts with a classically constructed, psychotic-killer-with-a-horrendous-childhood thriller featuring young detective Carson Ryder, himself troubled by a problematic past. Carson and partner Harry Nautilus are the newly formed two-man Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team, referred to as Piss-it by the other members of the Mobile, Ala., police force. While Piss-it’s official mandate is the investigation of murders committed by particularly horrendous killers, the formation of the team is actually a public relations scheme.

Nevertheless, when a headless body turns up in a local park, Piss-it has its first real case. At the autopsy, Carson meets new hire Dr. Ava Davenelle, who is handling corpse-cutting duties. Of course he’s immediately smitten, though his polite advances are rejected. Turns out she has her own life as well as a job-threatening problem, which Carson must solve while simultaneously identifying the killer who has meanwhile added several more headless victims to his growing list.

Here’s why I loved this book.

1) Kerley is a wordsmith. I love wordsmiths. I tweeted a few pieces from the book while I was reading it. Sleep, when it finally arrived, was paper thin and shot through with rats and the smell of burning silk. And another. A nose ridge like the spine of a slender book, and a mahogany tan independent of seasons. I know lots of readers find such language indulgent of the author, but I eat it up. For me, it sets a book apart.

2) The dynamic duo of rookie Detective Carson Ryder and his veteran partner Harry Nautilus. The two feed off one another with whiplash banter, a marriage of the best sort, and Booklist calls Harry “perhaps the most appealing character in the book.”

3) Carson’s OTHER partner. Since I was reading the e version on my iPod Touch, I didn’t have the back copy to read, so knew nothing about the part Carson’s brother Jeremey plays in the story – and, it seems – the whole series. From the PW review: Carson’s secret weapon of detection is his brother, an insane mass-murderer who feeds him clues on the nature of madmen from an asylum, à la Hannibal Lecter. Their relationship is freaky, and more than a bit frightening, but I couldn’t look away.

4) In the Booklist review, the reviewer says: Kerley’s plot is a treasure chest of interlocked pieces, each holding a secret, a link in the chain connecting the novel’s characters to the demons in their various closets. I LOVED that about the book because for awhile I thought a couple of the subplots were side trips to nowhere, but they all fit in an amazing puzzle – even though not all of them impact the main plot. Kerley did a great job with the red herrings. They never felt like a waste of time.

5) Kerley shows insanity brilliantly, and there’s much here to show, but his portrayal of the Hannibal Lecter beautiful mind insanity is exquisite. Some of the backstory that leads to the reader understanding where the crazy came from is hard to read, but the words on the page, the way they’re written, truly SHOW rather than TELL the insane.

Now a couple of things that I didn’t love.

1) Again from the Booklist review: Kerley jacks up the tension effectively with nicely placed jumps between Carson’s narration and the tortured thoughts of the killer, building to an all-stops-out climax involving a raging river and a supremely horrific home movie. While I loved the all-stops-out climax that read like a movie ending, or even like some of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher over-the-top action scenes, the horrific home movie part had me rolling my eyes. I got it, but it was a villainous stretch I found hard to make. Don’t get me wrong. It was clever and well done, but my inner cynic wasn’t onboard.

2) I bought THE HUNDREDTH MAN for the Kindle, then found out the second book in the series, The Death Collectors, was not available electronically or even as a new paperback. I had to order it used. Then I ordered the third, A Garden of Vipers, to read on my iPod Touch. The next three books, Blood Brother, In The Blood, and Little Girls Lost, I had to also order used. I can’t tell from Kerley’s Website, but it looks like the recent ones have only been released in the UK. Very irritating to make it hard to get them, but I know the author has nothing to do with this, and I wanted them badly enough to suss them out used and pay the premium. Just wish Jack instead of the bookstore was getting the cash – which would have happened if I’d figured out earlier enough in the shopping process that I could’ve ordered them from Amazon UK, sigh.

If you’re a fan of Criminal Minds and Thomas Harris and Jack Reacher, THE HUNDREDTH MAN is worth hunting down. Thanks, Lisa!

I get it now. I really do. After finishing the book I’d been reading on my iPod Touch yesterday morning, I was SO tempted last night when climbing into bed to download the second in the series. SO tempted. So very VERY tempted. I did NOT give in to temptation as I was already intent on a new ebook and had started a print one, too. But, wow. Just being able to lie in bed and grab the book I wanted from the Whispernet ether was almost too much to resist.

Of course, when I tried to explain this to the husband, he didn’t let me get out more than a couple of words before telling me I did not need a Kindle. Once I pointed out he needed to, ahem, LISTEN TO WHAT I WAS SAYING, I told him that I agreed. I do not need a Kindle. I love reading on the iPod Touch. I don’t need light. I can read in the dark, and depending if I’m inside or out, I can switch from black text on white to white text on black; the latter probably wouldn’t have occurred to me until I saw the woman in front of me in the theater when @cuppacafe went to see Avatar reading in white text on black on her iPhone. I don’t read blogs or Websites set up similarly, but the resolution on the iPod Touch is super clear, crisp and clean.

Of course, my dilemma now is giving equal attention to my bookshelves full of dead tree books. I refuse to buy electronic copies of the print books I already have, so I’m alternating between the two formats to try and make even a small dent in the personal library I’ve accumulated too easily thanks to Amazon Prime. Between Prime and Whispernet, I’m not sure if Amazon is the devil, or my BFF

One of the first Websites I hit every morning is Shirt.Woot. For ten bucks and free shipping, you can get a T-shirt with original art. There’s a new shirt every day, and if you want it for the ten bucks, that one day’s your only guaranteed chance – if you get there before they sell out. Some are fun, some are stupid, some are cheesy, some are great. For me, this one, called Autobiography, fell into the great category.

With several funky, confusing, gray, lonely days behind me, I got a kick out of today’s timely and much needed butt-kicking Note from the Universe:

What if funky, confusing, gray, lonely days were just part of a “system” that, in turn, created bright, rich, happy, friendly days?

What if they were just meant to give deeper elements of your creativity a rest?

What if they were deliberately crafted holidays, of a sort, devised by your inner psyche to relieve you from the pressure of artificial expectations?

Would you still bemoan them, wonder what’s wrong with you, or fear that they’ll never end? Or, Alison, would they kind of tickle you pink?

And now I’ve apparently agreed to a super fast 4K word challenge to support a couple of friends who have to do the same. Just need to decide which project to attack.

Even though it was 70 degrees out, I made Pioneer Woman’s Italian Meatball Soup for dinner on Monday. Yum. @cuppacafe and I ate almost the whole pot between us, with only a bowl leftover for my lunch today! (And we won’t talk about making cupcakes out of her Best Chocolate Sheet Cake Ever. But I did. And it is.)

On the not as successful cooking front, a couple of weeks ago, I made this Slow Cooker Chicken Stroganoff after seeing several raves about it on Twitter. Lesson learned? Don’t trust everything you read on Twitter. Not a good recipe for our family.

I’m thinking of dropping our Netflix subscription down to one movie at a time as we’re not watching anything that comes to the house. Today I mailed back two unwatched discs. No. 1 Daughter is too busy with nursing studies, and streams what she wants to watch, as does @cuppacafe, though he did order up Topper this week.

I’ve gone back to the beginning of LOST to rewatch before the final season starts in February – not that I’m going to have time. Netflix happens to be streaming all the seasons that are out on DVD. I have some thoughts on how a second watching 1) clears up some questions while at the same time 2) reveals some really poorly thought out character motivations (Season 1, Episode 12, Whatever The Case May Be).

Having now owned an iPod Touch for nearly a month, I can say without a doubt that I would never want an iPhone. Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE the iPod Touch as an ereader and an mp3 player. I’m having fun with apps like Treadmill and I use the IMDB app constantly (we have a thing for figuring out where we’ve seen actors before). But I have a Blackberry Curve and can type on that keyboard almost as fast as I can on my pc, so as cool as it would be to have one device, it’s not going to happen. And then there’s the battery life issue with the iPod Touch that’s just ridiculous! I’ll be sticking with Blackberry for my phone, texting, and mobile email needs.

Takumi has taken to hanging out on the backyard work table. No idea why.

California, 1985. Four children, running through the woods after their school, stumble upon a partially buried female body, eyes and mouth glued shut. Close behind the children is their teacher, Anne Navarre, shocked by this discovery and heartbroken as she witnesses the end of their innocence. What she doesn’t yet realize is that this will mark the end of innocence for an entire community, as the ties that bind families and friends are tested by secrets uncovered in the wake of a serial killer’s escalating pattern of destruction.

Vince Leone, a pioneering FBI investigator called in from Washington to consult on the case, is charged with interpreting that pattern. He’s using a brand-new technique – profiling – to develop a theory of the murders, a strategy that pushes him ever deeper into the lives of the four children, and closer to the young teacher whose bond with her traumatized students puts her on a collision course with the killer.

As new victims are discovered and the media scrutiny of the investigation bears down on them, both Vince and Anne are unsure if those who suffer most are the victims themselves, or the family and friends of the killer – unaware that someone very close to them is a brutal, calculating psychopath whose reign of terror is only just getting started.

Two things struck me about this book: 1) It took me longer than expected to get into it, and 2) I think this is one of Tami Hoag’s best. Those two things at first seem contradictory, but they’re really not. There are a lot of characters to keep track of in DEEPER THAN THE DEAD. A LOT, and it took awhile to figure out who was going to play a role and who was going to be a secondary bystander populating the small college town of Oak Knoll. Once that was all squared away and the secondaries (mostly cops who get lines of dialogue but little more) took their place, the book is hard to put down. (As an interesting aside, the cover copy on the book jacket isn’t the same as the cover copy at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Those earlier promotional versions don’t mention Vince Leone but mention another major player, Tony Mendez, instead, making me wonder if even Hoag wasn’t sure who needed page time early on.)

Something else about Hoag. I attended a conference in Houston years ago where she spoke about her process and how she would get to the end of a book and still not know whodunnit. She’d laid out all these people’s lives and backgrounds and motivations and woven their story lines intricately, but she’d done so not knowing who would be the bad guy in the end. I thought about that while reading, wondering if she went into this one just as blindly. If so, her way of writing works brilliantly for her because she gives equal page time to any number of possible suspects, developing the characters so that any one of them could be the villain and none stand out saying, “It’s me!” I liked that a lot while reading. It kept me involved, paying attention to every little detail, wondering if this item or that would come up later in a Chekov’s gun sort of reveal. Eventually, the list of suspects is narrowed down, but the last sixty pages of the book were nonetheless nail-bitingly suspenseful. And that’s a master at work, keeping the reader on the edge of her seat even AFTER she knows whodunnit.

See, that’s my problem with suspense. It’s not suspenseful. Too often, because he or she knows the outcome, the author lets the reader in on what’s happening before it’s time for the reader to know. Because I love suspense, I continue to read it, but I’m almost never surprised. (The Lincoln Lawyer surprised me.) I like seeing the twists and turns stories take, but I’m rarely wowed. Tami wowed me with this one. How do I know when I’m wowed? Because I’m covering the page with my hand as I read and only letting myself see a bit at a time so I don’t inadvertently find out what comes next before it’s time to know. The further I got into DEEPER THAN THE DEAD, the more of the page I found myself hiding. I didn’t want to see what happened. I wanted to go along on Hoag’s ride without knowing where I was going to end up.

A couple of things. Don’t go into this looking for a romance. There’s a romantic subplot, but that’s not the story. Also, the thing about this book that I didn’t know when I pre-ordered it ages ago (I buy anything she writes. I don’t care what it’s about.) is that it’s set in 1985 – which means it’s a suspense where fingerprints are still identified visually by trained technicians. There is no DNA evidence to process or use to identify suspects. There are no national databases of information. The crime solving is all grunt work, feet pounding the pavement, hands knocking on doors. That part of the time period worked for me. It was fun to visit the past and watch law enforcement work a case without any handy dandy immediate CSI magic performed to prove this or that. But the time period also gave me some issues. Even though the show was set in 1973, I was expecting Life On Mars where the era was never in question.

What I got instead were pop culture and fashion references instead of a three-decades past emotional resonance. I never felt I was anywhere but in current times. Once in awhile modern sensibilities would slip through – characters saying, “It’s all good,” or another talking about “owning” a behavior. Both are fairly innocuous and could have been said in 1985, but it was the context that made them stand out for me. The second problem I had was with Franny, Anne’s flamboyantly gay best friend who taught kindergarten in the school where she taught fifth grade. I know the book was set in California, but for me Franny’s situation didn’t ring true for 1985. I wanted more than big hair and big shoulder pads and references to The Golden Girls to set the stage. But those things are minor and they never stopped me from enjoying the book.

There is a depth, heh, to DEEPER THAN THE DEAD that I find missing in too much suspense. I feel the same about Lisa Gardner’s and Tess Gerritsen’s writing as I do about Tami Hoag’s. They portray the human condition so fully, mining the emotions of their characters in ways most male authors don’t. (Most, not all.) These bigger books with multiple characters and subplots give them the room to do so, room missing in shorter romantic suspense novels, and in this book particularly, Tami Hoag sucked me in so completely that once I got over the initial bump, I couldn’t put it down. I did almost nothing else all weekend but read. Highly HIGHLY recommended. If you’re writing suspense, this is what you should be striving for. An amazing, amazing book.

As I’m supposed to be writing 1000 words a day, but I haven’t been adding to my Scribometer, I thought I’d list the top ten places my words have been going.

1) A NEW and MORE EXCITING 241 word bio to replace the dull and boring 109 word bio I’d sent originally to the editor at HCI Books to be used for PR and the title plan for my VOWS story.

2) The first page of what I was hoping would be my VOWS story as I loved the characters and their journey and knew exactly how I wanted to start their book. Turns out I’ll be writing something else and that will be settled on soon.

3) A number of additional words to a proposal I fine-tuned and sent out. No idea of the net number, just a lot of words cut, and less words added, resulting in a tighter submission. A good thing for the book, just not for the Scribometer.

4) Many MANY emails as I finished a Website design for a new client and corresponded with her, added a new member to Access Romance and did the necessary back and forth to get her information, other emails going to editors, still more to friends as I argued my position on book formats and discussed career planning.

5) Quite a few tweets.

6) Innumerable texts to No. 1 Daughter (who finally added unlimited texting to her cell phone plan), to #2, to @cuppacafe, and to the son and d-i-l as we planned Sunday’s family dinner. Why pick up a phone when you can let the fingers fly?

7) Query letters.

8) Business plans and brainstorming, as my partner and I work out the handling and prioritizing of our monthly schedules at Access Romance.

9) Handwritten story notes on an idea that’s been simmering for several months. I’d put it aside thinking it too big and scary, but parts of it are coming together so I can’t let them escape while I wait for the rest to arrive.

10) To Do Lists, short diary entries, and record keeping for my own OCD benefit.

To help save my eyes from exhaustion, I’ve taken to writing my manuscripts with a soft blue background instead of on glaring white. It’s helped a lot. At the end of the day, my eyes don’t ache quite as much. Anyone else have vision-saving tricks?

This morning before @cuppacafe left for work, he and I took No. 1 Daughter’s cat to the vet as it was time for her to go to Kitteh Heaven. She’d had several strokes since October, and two seizures yesterday, and she’s in a much better place now. No. 1 had rescued Jazzy Cleopatra VooDoo Kitty from her hard life on the streets, and spoiled her rotten the last four years. She hadn’t had to lift a paw for anything, and ruled the dogs with her iron will. They chase all neighborhood cats (and we have a gazillion) out of the backyard with great glee, but they gave Jazzy, the queen, wide berth.

RIP Jazzy.

On our way home, we passed this truck, so of course I had to snap a pic and share.