Writer Unboxed Redirect: What Has 31 Authors and 1 Vision?

Answer: The Calgary branch of the Romance Writers of America. Shepherded by multi-published, multi-genred author Tawny Stokes, they wrote and self-published a series of linked books in a unique vision of a writers’ cooperative. Now Tawny joins me on Writer Unboxed to delineate the pros and cons of their model.

31 Authors, 1 Model for a Writers’ Cooperative: Author Tawny Stokes on the Bandit Creek Seriesif you’d like to join us.

While I’m here, me Zesties, it’s not too late to be entered to win a copy of NYT-bestselling Lisa Brackmann’s GETAWAY. Comment on Part I or II of our interview if you’d like to participate.

Can You Outsmart the Tart? (Visual Pun #3)

Below is the visual representation of a common expression.

Can you figure out what it means?

Turn to page two and scroll down for the answer.

Can you outsmart the Tart 3

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Lisa Brackmann on Her New Thriller, GETAWAY: Interview and Giveaway – Part II

If you’re joining us today, I’m with NYT- and USA Today-bestselling author, Lisa Brackmann. In Part I of this interview, we talked about the professional writer’s mindset and Lisa’s suggestions on how to incorporate topical events into fiction. In this part of the interview: one of Lisa’s core themes and writing a potentially controversial ending. (No spoilers.)

Jan: As with your debut, I see the seeds of social commentary under GETAWAY’s thriller plot. Without getting into any spoilers, Michelle’s Mexican vacation is a last hurrah before she faces the consequences of her husband’s shoddy business practices. She seems a victim, but as events unfold, I begin to wonder about a pattern of willful blindness. Talk to me about ignorance, Lisa. Why is it important, and why does it get under your skin?

Lisa: I think, for one, life is short and unpredictable, and so many of us sleepwalk through our days. We don’t really live, and in materially wealthy societies, where most of us who are reading this have not had to contend with not having enough food to eat, or not having a place to sleep, or living in fear that armed gangs may threaten our lives, this just strikes me as terribly sad and so wasteful.

I don’t want to belittle the very real existential problems that people grapple with in wealthy countries, so-called “First World problems,” because a lot of those are very real. People are unhappy for real reasons. We live in societies, where, in my opinion, some things have gone terribly wrong. People work and work and work, for less financial reward, in more stressful environments, “doing more with less,” in communities where civic institutions have been defunded; they’re trying to send their kids to colleges where the tuitions have increased to levels where the kids graduate with crushing debt. We’re encouraged to value wealth and material success above all, and the professions that have somehow been deemed those most worthy of pursuit because of the money you can make from them are, to me, not all that valuable in any real positive sense. I mean, you’re telling me that options traders and mega-bank CEOs contribute more to society than teachers or firemen?

I realize that sounds like a tired progressive trope, but it’s true.

I think we Americans are living in a country where the wealthy and the powerful have manipulated our so-called democratic institutions and turned them into money-funnelling devices, where the wealth is taken out of the pockets of the poor and the working and middle-classes and redistributed upwards, where the very notion of “the Commons,” of the common good and communal institutions that are not profit-based have been devalued. I think that decades of very sophisticated propaganda have helped bring this about. And it’s trends like this that  require us to wake up and understand what’s really going on. I honestly don’t know how we bring about positive change in these circumstances, but I do know that said change is impossible if people are not awake to the conditions in which they actually live.

Now does this specifically relate to Michelle? 

Bringing it back to the book—because in spite of all this ranting, I really did try to write an entertaining thriller here—Michelle is a person who chose comfort over risk. I can’t condemn her for that. As a species, we are conditioned to seek comfort and to take advantage of that when we find it. But we also have the ability to evaluate our situation and ask ourselves if we’re making the best choices.

Michelle’s backstory is, she wasn’t happy in her marriage. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t satisfying. And she’s not sure how much of that is her relationship with her husband, Tom, and how much of that is her lack of challenge and engagement with her own life. She’s seeking some kind of passion, but isn’t sure where to find it. She knows that something is not quite right with what Tom is doing in his business, but she chooses not to press him about it. Because in spite of her vague discontent, she is living a comfortable life, materially. She’s able to do what she wants. If only she knew what it was that she wanted!

We all ask ourselves about the risks involved with making changes. What we tend not to ask about is the risk of not choosing. Of staying in the same place. In Michelle’s case, her comfortable life was built on sand, and she ends up in a far riskier place by not making a change before it all collapsed.

Michelle is forced to come to grips with her own culpability in her husband’s misdeeds, her enabling of his bad behaviour by pretending that nothing was wrong. Her challenge throughout the book is to understand the dangerous situation in which she’s landed, the reality of how things work. And the reality is not pretty. What her husband did wasn’t violent, but it was corrupt, and she’s now seeing how corruption can lead to violence, how they inevitably intertwine. She’s seeing that a lot of the comfort enjoyed by the wealthy is built on a foundation of poverty. And having lost her former position of privilege, she’s realizing just how disposable she is in this kind of system.

If you could have your wish, what concrete steps would individuals take to remain knowledgeable and engaged in the world’s issues?

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It’s Sunday, So Time for a Tartitude Visual Pun

Below is the visual representation of a common expression.

Can you figure out what it means?

Turn to page two and scroll down for the answer.

Pages: 1 2

Stalking Michael Hauge and Other Non-Psychotic Matters

1. I’m taking a road trip this weekend, me Zesties. I’m driving with Frank to another Albertan city where he will play with his cousins, and I’ll attend a full-day writing conference with Michael Hauge. In fact, this makes my FOURTH class with MH, because in last summer’s RWA, I followed him from session to session to, um…session. In my defense, he’s a gifted teacher on story structure and provided me with a number of huge “aha” moments.

But this weekend should be fantastic, because that restraining order expired. Also, this time I’m organized.

I have a dozen freshly laundered, monogrammed hankies to give to him, in case he has to recurrently mop his brow. (It’s odd how some of my favorite teachers share this mannerism. They must all overdress. Maybe I should draft up a quick manifesto on how to dress appropriately for hotel banquet room presentations. This could make a good and endearing ice-breaker for post-conference cocktail parties. I think it could cement me, in the lecturer’s mind, as a prepared and businesslike writer. What do you think?)

I’m taking a guest with me: a non-writing writer named “Ted.” This guy is talented and full of ideas, but he needs a gentle nudge. I’m thinking Michael Hauge will be closer to a fourteen-story fall, so that could work out nicely.

2. I’m looking for a pithy title for a series of visual puns I anticipate running on Sunday mornings. (Like this one.) As I said on Facebook, my brain loves to create these kind of things, and I’ve always been a nut for puzzles. I’d love to hear feedback on two things:

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Lisa Brackmann on Her New Thriller, GETAWAY: Interview and Giveaway – Part I

I’m calling today’s guest “a writer of thrillers with a thrilling career.” Since last year’s interview on Writer Unboxed, Lisa Brackmann’s had a few adventures. Her debut, Rock Paper Tiger was nominated for the Strand Fiction award and hit the NYT’s and USA Today’s bestseller list. Already picked to be an Amazon Best Book of May, Lisa’s latest thriller, Getaway, promises an equally impressive trajectory.

Getaway’s blurb: Michelle Mason tells herself she’s on vacation. A brief stay in the Mexican resort town of Puerto Vallarta. It’s a chance to figure out her next move after the unexpected death of her banker husband, who’s left behind a scandal and a pile of debt. The trip was already paid for, and it beats crashing in her sister’s spare room. When a good-looking man named Daniel approaches her on the beach, the margaritas have kicked in and she decides: why not?

But the date doesn’t go as either of them planned. An assault on Daniel in her hotel room is only the beginning of the peril Michelle faces. As the conflict escalates, she’ll need to fight smart if she wants to survive her getaway.

Jan: Any other career highlights I missed?

Lisa: It’s been quite a ride! Rock Paper Tiger and Getaway both sold to Harper Collins UK. They’re using different names (and different cover art), Year of the Tiger and Day of the Dead, respectively. Year of the Tiger published April 26 of this year, and Day of the Dead will come out in the fall. The team at Harper UK have been awesome to work with—I’ve had a lot of interaction with them via email and hope I have the opportunity to meet them in person soon.

I just sold a third book to Soho Press, a sequel to Rock Paper Tiger tentatively called Hour of the Rat, that should be published in the first part of 2013.

Right now I’m preoccupied with Getaway, which pubbed May. I’m also thinking a lot about the book that comes next. I’m still not sure what that’s going to be, but I’ve learned that in this business, you always have to think ahead, at least you do if you’re a writer at the point I’m at in the kind of career that I seem to be having.

Getaway CoverThe skeleton in your cover art is rather ornate. For those readers who might not understand the significance, can you explain?

Skulls are a traditional motif in Mexican culture and Mexican art. They don’t have the negative connotation that they do in Anglo culture. Skulls are frequently associated with the Day of the Dead, which is held November 1—2. It’s a holiday to celebrate the spirits of the departed, to remember them and honour them. There’s also a sense, I think, that all of us are close to death. So we should be on familiar and comfortable terms with mortality.

That said, it’s an awesomely creepy cover, isn’t it? I love it!

You’re a professional novelist, meaning your income is derived from your writing career. Waiting for inspiration is no longer an option, even if you’d ever worked that way. Tell me about the quality of your writing.  Is there any demonstrable difference between the days you’re “feeling it” and those you’re not?

I think the only real difference is that I am more productive when I’m “feeling it”—I’m able to get more words out, more quickly—than I am when I’m not. I don’t think there’s all that much difference in quality, to be honest. Generally the times when writing is harder for me are when I’m trying to figure out what’s next, or when I’m trying to set a new scene—that latter one is always tricky because I want to capture a place accurately, but succinctly, and it just seems to take a lot of brain power, as well as research. But I’ve always done better when I write regularly, like every day. If I take a few days off on a project, it can really be a bear getting back into it sometimes.

I have also found that this was not as tough a transition in some ways as you might think—well, once I made it past the dreaded “Second Book Syndrome.” The way that I was able to approach putting my writing out there without wanting to crawl into a hole, as well as writing more fearlessly in the first place, was by looking at my writing as a job. Being able to detach myself—as in “my self” from the product somewhat, helped lessen the horrible self-consciousness and shyness I had about my work. Which is not to say I still don’t have plenty of cringe-worthy moments, but the work’s out in the world now, so I try to maintain some professionalism about it.

I’ve always been a horrible procrastinator, and as much as I love writing in some ways, I’m not really someone who has to write. But writing was always the thing I was best at, so it’s more like, I have to do something. Now I’ve put myself in the position where I really do have to write, so overall it works better for me.

You seem to have the ability to anticipate the world’s interest in particular international events. For example, your debut, Rock Paper Tiger, is a thriller set in China. It was published at a time when the world seemed to freshly thirst for stories about that nation. Now there’s GETAWAY, which you began two years ago, but which has a storyline that feels as if it might have been ripped from today’s headlines about Mexico. To what do you attribute this ability to anticipate trends? Is it luck?

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A Visual Pun for Those Who Like Those Kind of Things

Think you know what it means? Don’t spoil it for the others. Click through to the next page to find out.

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