By Carole Shmurak

Before 1926, Agatha Christie had published several books about her detective, Hercule Poirot, but they weren’t selling spectacularly. Then came the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In the same year, Christie went missing for 10 days, finally turning up at a hotel in Harrogate, an apparent victim of amnesia. These two events coming so close upon each other made her famous. Since then, she’s been a household name.

It’s difficult to review Roger Ackroyd without giving the ending away. It’s a classic “country house murder” with a small circle of suspects, lots of red herrings and a few well-placed clues. The ending will leave the reader either in awe of Christie’s ingenuity or absolutely furious at her.

Christie’s sense of humor is apparent in some very funny scenes between Dr. Sheppard and his spinster sister Caroline (who may have been the prototype for Miss Marple) and in a riotous Mah Jongg game. A few other colorful figures inhabit the book too: Colonel Blunt, who appears always to be looking at something far away (and who makes the book occasionally sound like a game of Clue) and a willful housemaid named Ursula Bourne.

Hercule Poirot is, of course, brought in to solve the murder mystery and notices the things that no one else does, but he is not quite as annoyingly smug here as he is in some of Christie’s books. Poirot’s mishandling of the English language and Sheppard’s mistaking him for a hairdresser add some amusing moments.

Ackroyd is perhaps not the best mystery Christie ever wrote, but it is a “must read” for any lover of classic mysteries.

Google Announces New Embedding Feature

A new announcement from Google this week has the literary world abuzz—Google has made the books that it features in Google Book Search available to embed on any website or blog.

The new feature from Google Books will allow web designers to post either a whole book or just a passage of a book, depending on the preferences set by the publisher or author, via the viewer to websites and blogs. Google Books has already posted an open set of APIs for web designers to copy into their websites and blogs. Users have the ability to customize applications and search functions once the book is embedded on the website. The process to embed is simple; in fact, embedding books on websites or blogs is similar to the way videos from YouTube are embedded on sites.

Online book shoppers are happy that they will have the luxury of previewing a book before purchasing it online. “I no longer have to judge a book by its cover while shopping online,” says one online shopper. “I pass up buying many books online because I don’t want to purchase a book only for it to arrive in the mail and not be what I expected.”

The new feature is more than just a marketing tool; it’s also a social networking tool to add to the long list of user-friendly social networking websites. Alex Diaz, Product Manager of Google Book Search, says, “By providing tools that help sites connect readers with books in new and interesting ways, we hope publishers and authors will find even wider audiences for their works.” According to Diaz, the new website will integrate social features including ratings, reviews and readers’ book collections. Google Books’ “My Library” feature allows users to create profiles and select books for their personal online collection. With the embedding feature now available, web designers can allow reviews of books to be viewed on multiple websites and blogs via the embedded page.

The question remains: Will the ability to embed books on websites make a real difference in sales? Case in point: Amazon.com. Amazon has used the embedding feature on its site since late 2003, and also happens to be the number one book retailer in the world. Needless to say, Amazon insiders are saying that execs are not happy about the announcement. Up until this week, Amazon was the only online retailer that gives shoppers the option to read inside the book. With Google offering the same features, Amazon will have some stiff competition in the world of online book buying.

It’s early in the morning and I’m outside zipping up my jacket. Even though the afternoon will be sunny and warm, the days seem to be starting out cooler and cooler. I stop to stare up at the hot air balloon floating over my backyard. It’s so close I can see the people inside. While I was still warm in my bed they were drifting over the vineyards; the leaves on the verge of changing color as dark, ripe grapes hang heavy on the vines. I pick a fig off the tree by my shed and split open its purple skin, smiling at the red flesh before devouring it. As I walk downtown I notice pomegranates are beginning to blush. Change is in motion and it’s officially fall.

When we are taught Greek mythology, we learn that without the pomegranate we wouldn’t have seasons. Persephone is abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld. Even though Persephone knows that if she eats or drinks anything in the underworld she will never escape, Hades tricks her into eating a few pomegranate seeds. Persephone is doomed by the berries and her mother, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, mourns her daughter’s absence. The earth becomes desolate. Zeus must intervene. A bargain is struck. Each year Persephone is forced to spend a month in the underworld for each of the pomegranate seeds she ate. Demeter annually mourns her daughter’s absence during those lonely months causing plants to hibernate and die. Persephone must be down below now because I can feel the cold days coming ahead.

For the writer, the cold is nothing to dread. Although it’s hard not to mourn the loss of those sunny days in the hammock or at the beach, as the pomegranates ripen into heavy ruby red orbs there is a hidden abundance of juicy arils inside. We remember Pietro Aretino’s dictum, “Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius.” As the landscape loses its lushness and we’re left with stark forms in the landscape, we will either be inspired by what was hidden during the overgrowth or we will dress the trees with our own imaginations. When it’s cold, our minds alight. We feel more than the cold.

Even physically I like to touch things when I write, feel their texture, study the nuances in color as I turn them around in my hands. Smooth, dense pomegranates are a favorite and I’ll soon be planting my own tree to be reminded of the nature of the seasons every time I’m out back. For now, I have my diverse and colorful hand-made ceramic pomegranates I’ve collected from Israeli artists over the years to inspire me. It’s said that King Solomon’s crown was fashioned after the crown of the pomegranate. Let’s let the cool months ahead be the writer’s crown as well. As you trade in your bathing suit for a blanket, allow your mind to be set ablaze in spite of the diminishing warmth of the sun. It’s nearly time to break open the deceivingly smooth outer layer to reveal the juicy red arils within.

Tyler Oaks earned her Bachelor of Arts in Spanish from California State University, Stanislaus and her Master of Arts in Spanish from California State University, Sacramento. Tyler lives in California's Napa Valley with her husband and twin daughters. Tyler is presently at work on her next novel.

Writers use intuition in all kinds of situations, from deciding what to write, to making plot decisions, to following creative urges that make no logical sense. Intuition is always trying to lead us to the right destination, and to get there we must learn to follow it.

Shakti Gawain, author of Developing Intuition, says that to capitalize on this innate faculty, we must pay attention to what’s going on inside us during our quiet, distracting thoughts and get in touch with the place where gut-feelings reside. In our logic-biased culture, this requires discipline and practice, but the benefits make it well worth the effort.

Here are some steps you can take to start developing and applying your intuition (for more detailed explanations, refer to Gawain’s book)

1. Quiet your mind. Allow 5-10 minutes for this exercise, and combine it with numbers 2 and 3 below. Get comfy. Close your eyes. Take deep breaths through your nose, exhaling slowly through your mouth. Imagine nourishing air moving into and out of your body. Focus it with each breath into a different body part—feet, chest, head etc.—allowing each part to relax completely. Let any thoughts that arise float away on your exhalations.

2. Review and learn. With a quiet mind, review your day in as much detail as possible, searching it for intuitive moments you may have overlooked. Did you have any hunches today? Any feelings of rightness or wrongness in your writing? Feelings of knowing something without knowing why? How did you handle these feelings? Did you act on them? Did you push them aside? How did you feel afterwards?

3. Shift awareness. Imagine your mental awareness moving out of your head and into your solar plexus or belly, where intuition resides. With each breath, go deeper into this place. Ask yourself, “What do I need to remember or be aware of right now?” Listen for thoughts, feelings or images that arise. Be aware of how your body feels during this process. With practice, you’ll be able to ask more pointed questions and become more adept at responding intuitively.

4. Take action. For one day, one week or longer, depending on your comfort level, imagine that your intuition is infallible. Give yourself permission to act on it every time it arises, in writing or any other area of your life. Let go of doubt and fear and see what happens. How does it feel to follow intuition? To ignore it? If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice a difference.

Once we’re tuned in, intuition can become a reliable guiding force in everything we do. You know those synchronistic moments that happen in writing, those insights and connections that infuse our work with meaning? They occur when we quiet our minds and let intuition speak. When we trust it and listen, we tend to experience an increased sense of aliveness, a sense that in spite of the circuitous route we might have taken, we have somehow arrived exactly where we’re meant to be.

Intuition Defined
Intuition Rationalized

Have a question for Doug? Click here to submit it to THE WRITE MIND.

Doug Kurtz is a published novelist, certified life coach and the owner of Write Life Coaching (www.writelifecoaching.com). He earned his MA in creative writing at the University of Colorado, where he also taught fiction writing. He currently lives in Boulder, where he’s busy coaching other writers and working on his next novel.

Hurricane Ike

We have all used experiences in our lives as fodder for our stories, often times using a situation exactly how we remember it. More often than not, however, we have to trim some edges and add some of our own to make the scene fit.

There is a temptation in this use of real life in our fiction, and Hurricanes Gustav and Ike reminded me of it. When I was a freshman in high school, our principal Mr. Wayne Coleman got on the intercom at the end of one school day and announced that, because of Hurricane Andrew, the school would be shut down for the next day or so. Our P.E. locker room erupted with joy. We were a bunch of near-sighted teenagers who apparently hadn’t heard the hurricane part of his announcement. And we certainly hadn’t anticipated having to miss three weeks of school. All we heard was that we were off. Our precious time could now be spent doing something we actually wanted to do.

How foolish and in need of guidance we were. We got that guidance not one minute after the announcement. Mr. Coleman, a tall, imposing figure of a man, walked into that locker room and needed to say absolutely nothing to quiet us down. Looking back, I suspect we knew before our principal spoke why we were in trouble.

Mr. Coleman was angry, but it was not uncontrolled rage. I remember his firm tone even today, and I can see him in my mind teaching us young, foolish teenagers a lesson about being human: People should never find joy in the misfortunes and sufferings of others, no matter what days we got to spend in front of a television instead of in the classroom.

Hurricane Andrew crushed my hometown, leaving us without power for several weeks and making us all wish we were back in school. We would have gladly gone to school those days if it meant we could have our comfort of living back. I have tried to teach my own classes this valuable lesson, and I know that it has reached some, especially many of the seniors I taught as 11th graders last year. But I was disappointed when just the other day, after I had told my classes the story about my high school principal and his lesson, that many of the student body erupted much like we did in that locker room sixteen years ago this month when it was announced at a Wednesday night football game that we would be missing school on Friday. It stirred up my own selfishness and what I would have been capable of had Mr. Coleman not addressed our mistake that day.

I wonder what a Cameron or Galveston resident would say if shown a video of our community’s collective cry of joy that Wednesday night.

I wonder if all of those students who were cheering at the football game, who got several feet of water in their homes, would go back and take on the terrible burden of an 8 a.m.-2:40 p.m. day if they could have their homes and sense of stability back.

I wonder if that local family who met a fatal tragedy on the highway while evacuating for Ike would have sacrificed just one day of school to have their family members alive and well.
I agree with my old principal. I think it is important that people not rejoice nor capitalize on the misfortune of others. These real-life happenings give us a glimpse of the temptation we fiction writers face. Sure, one of the gifts we writers have is the ability to recognize the creative potential in any real-life situation. But with that gift comes a responsibility. In order to keep our work noble, we must not openly capitalize on others’ suffering and misfortune, else we run the risk of selling our souls just to write a story.

The Hurricane Series: Part 1 - Whispers in the Storm

Jeff LeJeune is the author of The Final Chase and Postmarked Baltimore. After a deadly disease during college redirected the course of his life, Jeff became a teacher at St. Louis Catholic High School in Lake Charles, LA where he was recently named a Claes Nobel Educator of Distinction.

Megan Chance is an award-winning author who has been the recipient of the Romance Writers of America (RITA) Award. A former television news photographer, her latest release is The Spiritualist.

Q: Your new novel combines a Victorian setting and the paranormal and is strongly atmospheric. How did you choose New York City circa 1850 as the setting, and how important is the setting to any plot?

A: I chose New York City for two reasons: New York’s culture at the time had a strongly rational and materialistic heritage, and because society ruled it. Spiritualism was gaining sway in the mid 1850s, but it was still new enough that Knickerbocker society found it intensely disconcerting. Anyone involved in it was thought to be on the fringe and not quite respectable, which served my story purposes very well.

Because my research dictates so much of the plot, I tend to create a story that can only exist in a certain place or time, and I believe the best stories couldn’t be ripped from their settings without changing how the tale is told.

Q: Your book has been described as an erotically charged chiller. What is your response?

A: I meant for it to have a distinctly erotic element. I believe that for women, especially, sex can be a transforming experience. For upper class women of that period who were brought up to believe that good women did not enjoy sex, that they were supposed to be passionless and spiritually elevated “angels of the house,” and who were so uneducated about physiology that their own bodies were mysteries to them, sexual passion would have been very threatening, especially the first time it was experienced.

I felt that a woman like Evelyn would feel particularly vulnerable and off-balanced by eroticism, and that perhaps it was the one thing that could force her to look deeper into herself, and to accept aspects of her character that she would rather deny.

Q: What are the differences and similarities of portraying characters through the lens of a photographer vs. the pen of a writer?

A: In photography, you only have a few moments to try to capture the truth of someone’s character. In writing, you have the luxury of time to really explore a character’s innermost thoughts and feelings. What photography taught me, however, was how to distill character, how to capture someone’s essence in a few strokes – after all, it isn’t what a person says or thinks that tells who they are, but what they do, which is not a bad lesson for a fiction writer to learn.

Q: Why do you suppose the romance genre lacks male writer representation?

A: I don’t know that it does. There are men who write romance, just as there are those who read it. There was a time when conventional wisdom stated that readers wouldn’t buy a thriller or mystery by a woman author, and I think that same wisdom exists in the romance world – editors think women won’t buy a romance if they know it’s written by a man, I’m also not sure that, in the end, romance wants or needs male representation. It is women’s fantasy after all, and frankly, why the hell shouldn’t women have something of their own?

Carlotta Holton is the author of Salem Pact and Touching The Dead, and is a member of the National Federation of Press Women and an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.

Carlotta Holton has just received her second award for Touching the Dead from the National Federation of Press Women Communications Contest. Click here to purchase the book.

By Amanda Linsmeier

A Promising Man (and About Time, Too) (HarperCollins, 2002) is a funny British novel by Elizabeth Young. The novel chronicles the life of 29-year old Harriet Grey, a snarky, somewhat insecure woman. Usually Harriet finds herself involved with all of her friends’ dramas, including her roommate Sally who got pregnant after a one-night stand with a married man, Jacko, her close male friend, who is almost like a brother and Helen, who’s got a couple of ungrateful children and an ex-husband who left her for a younger woman. Harriet is putting her dreams on hold to help out her friend Sally and is pretty much plodding through life when she sees an old friend from school. Nina was (and still is) beautiful, with “silk-curtain hair” and a bright little laugh. While they were never close friends, they did associate and Harriet always felt that Nina was better than her. When Harriet meets Nina’s current man, John, and he helps her out after she loses her purse, it is just another injustice to her. Why should Nina have a man like him? When she offers to pay John back for his kind gesture to her, he says yes and Harriet feels guilty and surprised. But it’s just drinks, right? The thing is, Harriet and John are perfect for each other. Both are smart-mouthed and witty with some definite vibes going on below the surface. Throw in a couple of gossipy girls, some long-standing jealousy and even a private investigator and you’ve got trouble. A Promising Man (and About Time, Too) had me rooting for Harriet and John.

Alright, so I had a little (sometimes a lot of) trouble with the slang. I’ve read other books by British authors but for some reason, this novel laid it on pretty heavily. How about “kneesie under the table would have been a doddle” or “whether ‘er indoors would have given their pottage to the pig” as two such examples? Scattered throughout the novel, these types of sentences were a bit confusing to me. On a positive note, I still enjoyed reading the book. I laughed out loud a couple of times and possibly even snorted once or twice. I loved John and I almost wanted to smack Harriet for not seeing how great he was. It was frustrating but typical for her to question everything about him. I melted when they finally got together and I also loved the parallel stories happening with the other characters in the novel. A Promising Man is a fun, light-hearted story about a woman who has exactly what she wants- and then questions and doubts it. I would definitely read another book by this author, only after purchasing a British slang dictionary first!