Reflections on a new year.

I hit the pause button on writing the last few weeks. That’s not strictly true. I did release Devil in Exile on December 13 and have completed the latest edit and revisions on Gods and Devils, but new writing and new blogs… well, I just had to take a break.

For me, writing has always been a deeply personal experience–no more so than on this blog–and I just had to get out of my head and be present in the real world for a while. I’d be lying if I said the last few months have been easy ones for me. But, now that my Anxiety Dragon is on a leash and curled up in a tiny corner of my consciousness, I see now that I’d also be lying if I didn’t say the last few months have been transformative and frankly, amazing.

The endings of good things are always hard, even more so when something ending is the last thing you ever expected or desired. However, endings bring opportunities for growth and if you fail to embrace those opportunities, then all that pain and disappointment are really for nothing.

Now that we’re at the end of the year, many of my friends are posting thoughts and reflections on 2021 and most are not fans. To be honest, 2021 kicked my ass, too. Not because it was a continual onslaught of disappointment, but because it lifted me as high as I thought I could go and then plummeted me to hell and back up again like a sadistic rollercoaster ride and I am not a fan of rollercoasters, to begin with.

At least I finally understand how traumatized Icarus must have been from his failed attempt to reach the sun.

My Anxiety Dragon is a big fan of those downward plummets. I can actually see it grow larger and stronger, its jaw dripping with glee as I scream in terror, watching the earth grow nearer. After my last plummet to hell, I had enough. This time, the dickhead took it too far. This time, it looked at me full of fire and fury and said ‘I win.’ And I simply said ‘no.’

When I was going through my divorce and terrified about my financial recovery and rebuilding my life, I had a mantra that I’d whisper to myself in those darker moments: I am a child of the Universe and the Universe takes care of her children. My life was so controlled by outside forces at the time, that all I could do was trust that I was making the right choice and the path would open for me in due time. And it did.

Eventually, those outside forces subsided. All the necessary hoops had been jumped through. And the path opened. Promotions at work came. Friendships came. Stability came. Love came. But what didn’t show up is acceptance. It was hard for me to accept this new reality as mine. It didn’t feel real. It didn’t feel deserved. So I held it at arm’s length. 

The events of 2021 slammed me down to the ground again and again until some sense finally got knocked into me and I reached out for help.

You see, I have an almost pathological inability to ask for help. True story: when I moved into my house three years ago, I did it all by myself even though I had family, friends, colleagues, and a boyfriend who all offered to help. If one of my sweet colleagues hadn’t literally texted me and said he had an afternoon free and asked if I was I sure I couldn’t use any help at all, I’m pretty certain I would have tried to move a giant bookcase and 200 pounds of patio furniture on my own just to prove a point.

But this past October, I was so low, so confused, and so heartbroken, I said that magic word: HELP. And help came so fast. My family and my girl squad swarmed on me before I could process that I had actually said the word. And they stayed, pouring love into the emptiness until all I could feel was abundance.

I’ve always felt that people kept me at arm’s length. That there was this wall people put up so they wouldn’t get too close to me. Standing in the middle of that swarm of love and abundance, I finally recognized that the wall was not getting built by them but by me. And I simply tore it down.

2021 was a rough year in many ways. I lost two very dear friends very suddenly and within hours of each other. I went through the stress and anxiety of a major business merger. I lost a relationship that I treasured very deeply. And let’s not forget the ongoing fun of the COVID-19 pandemic (please, get your vaccines and boosters. I will literally come to your house and beg on my knees if that will convince you). But I learned and I grew from every bad experience.

So, I’m not going to call 2021 a bad year. It was a transformative year. I started making music again. I finished two novels that have been languishing on my hard drive for almost three years. I confronted and finally put a leash on that dickhead Anxiety Dragon of mine. And I found my tribe, even have the tattoo to prove it. (Don’t believe me? that picture up top is us.)

Going into 2022, I have to say I’m feeling pretty good. Not because I think restarting our circle around the sun magically resets things. It doesn’t. We wake up on January 1 with the same problems we had when we went to sleep on December 31. But we also wake up with the same blessings. 

So here’s what I’m taking into 2022: 

Amazing friends who I love and who love me through my bad times and celebrate my successes. A loving and supportive family who owns up to past mistakes and forgives and hugs our way through it. A healthy and thriving son who makes me laugh and brings me joy every day. A tremendous new company culture that makes me excited to log onto my day job and will help me to learn and grow in my career. Another new book is about to be finished and a series accomplished. A new book idea that is inspiring me to work hard on my craft and will challenge me to do my best work yet. And new possibilities are yet to be explored.

Opportunity. Growth. Love. These are the three things I’m taking with me into 2022. 

And if you’d told me this is how I’d feel two months ago, I would have told you that you are a fucking liar. But that’s the thing about growth. It happens in the low points and the dark corners. It happens when we’re hurting. It happens when it feels like everything is falling apart and we’re utterly lost. When you’ve been broken open, that’s when something new can grow.

As an avid DIY-home improver and an obsessive neat freak, I can safely say that nothing was ever fixed, improved, re-built, or gloriously re-organized without making a disaster of a mess first. I can also tell you that standing in the middle of that disaster of a mess can feel overwhelming and that I’ve never stood there without thinking ‘what the fuck did I get myself into?’

For years, I’ve put my head down and tackled those messes on my own even if I was really in over my head. And that’s what I’m leaving behind in 2021. I’m going to continue to ask for help when I need it. To reach out to people when I miss them. To open myself up to the experience of being seen and being loved for who I am. My weaknesses and my strengths. My struggles and my successes. The whole me. And I’m not going to build those little walls anymore. Even if it means I might get hurt more often, I know I’ll get loved more too and it’s so worth it.

I am a child of the Universe and the Universe takes care of her children. But she doesn’t do it on her own. She brings the right people into your orbit to teach you those hard lessons that break you to pieces, but she also sends the right people to love you through it and show you how to rebuild.

The lost path.

This past weekend, First Born and I grabbed my dad for an early birthday picnic and what counts as a hike in Louisiana. I grew up backpacking the Montana wilderness with my dad. It’s the thing he loves most in the world, being under the trees and the sky and completely away from all the noise of our modern world. And I can’t blame him. There is a lot of noise. It’s inherent to being a responsible adult and it only gets worse the more digitally connected we are.

We spent the better part of a morning hiking all the loops for this particular nature area, saving the one that First Born loves best of all for last. But when we got there, it was closed for maintenance. I saw his face fall. A real bamboo forest in the middle of Louisiana is about as close to magic as you can get for a ten-year-old boy obsessed with Asia. But it looked clear. All the other trails were clear. How much damage could Hurricane Ida have done?

Turns out, quite a lot.

The path was mostly clear and navigable until we went to take the 0.3-mile trail back to the car. The way was blocked. Cue Gandalf shouting “you shall not pass!!!!”

Not one, not two, but five one-hundred-year-old trees had fallen over the trail, and just as we’d make our way around one, another was in the way. After realizing the fifth was too much for us to get around, we discovered we’d lost our way and had no idea where the trail was or how to get back to it.

It’s terrifying to lose your way in the wilderness and realize you have no idea which way to fucking go.

Go forward, where the path is blocked?

Go back, where the path is lost?

The answer is neither. You sit down and drink some water. Rest until that initial fight or flight response has passed. You calm your mind. Take a good hard look at where you went wrong and try to figure out how to untangle yourself. Where’s the nearest body of water? That might take you home. Where’s the nearest downhill slope? That might take you home. Where’s the nearest road? That for sure will take you home.

When you’re scared and lost and afraid in the brambles or cliffs or bayou, it’s easy to give up. It’s easy to feel destitute and alone. It’s easy to feel like a frightened child all alone in the world even if you’ve had some experience with getting lost and finding your way before. The initial response is always the same: Fuck. What do I do now?? The trick is to hit the pause button before the self-recriminations come and to flip your mental attitude switch from “I’m fucked” to “Adventure, ho!” as soon as you possibly can.

So, there we three were. My dad, leading the charge, clear-eyed, experienced, nonchalant almost. Between you and me, getting lost in a nature conservatory in Louisiana with cell phones and food and lots of water is more of an embarrassing proposition than a frightening one; so, neither of us was all that concerned and thought the whole thing was ridiculous and kind of fun. But First Born was genuinely afraid, so I pushed him from behind. “Keep following Papa, Papa will find the way.” While the path was uncertain, the outcome was foregone. We’d find the road, or bushwhack back to the Amite river via Google Maps, or, at the very worst, we might have to swallow our pride and call 911 after traipsing down a path that was clearly marked “closed for maintenance.” In any case, the only real dangers were a few scratches and mosquito bites.

But the fear First Born felt was real and normal. We all get scared when we’re forging a new path after losing the one that was so clearly marked. We see the person in front of us. The person who we could be, and they seem to be so far in the distance that we have to focus all our energy on them to keep from losing sight of them. Meanwhile, the person we used to be is following behind, telling us to keep going because there is no going back. But that poor soul stuck in the middle is genuinely afraid and uncertain and full of self-loathing for getting lost in the first place and can only feel the brambles lashing at their legs and the discomfort of creating a new path through a dense forest.

In the days since, I’ve realized that somewhere in the last six months or so, I lost my way. I held myself together and battled my way through, but I’ve been terrified and lost for months. And the reason I lost my way is something new and dangerously frightening: I had everything I always wanted.

To have it all at the same time. A fucking treasure trove of abundance. What do you do with that??? I’ll tell you what you do, you get anxious as fuck thinking you’re going to lose it. You become terrified because it’s important to you and what will you do if it gets taken away???

And you feel like an asshole for being afraid of something so fine and rare and wondrous. You found a fucking unicorn. Who’s afraid of finding a unicorn? So, you bury your fear in shame and hide it the best way you know how.

All of us have our own ways we avoid pain and fear. Maybe you retreat into bad habits, drinking too much and exercising too little.  Maybe you isolate, cleaning too much, and consciously sabotaging your relationships, trying to push the person closest to you away. Whatever is your preferred method of avoiding pain, one thing is for sure, you start to generally feel like a glorious failure even while you objectively crush every life goal because that’s how anxiety works.

The problem is that when you actively work to avoid your fear, you avoid the good things too. You can’t avoid one emotion and still feel the others. You can’t feel accomplishment. You can’t feel contentment, You can’t feel love. You lose the ability to feel anything positive to avoid that one negative emotion. If you’re like me, you deny that any of it is happening and choose the “fake it until you make it” method, being there while not being there at all. Holding yourself together until you’re alone and can fall apart and drop your basket where no one can see you. But that takes a self-sacrifice of will that, honestly, isn’t always the healthiest option. So maybe you do something else. You stick it out. You feel all the fear and anxiety and pressure until you just can’t anymore. So you avoid looking at it. But the harder you try to avoid that big scary splinter of fear or pain, the more numb you become until you wake up one day, feeling dead inside, and ready to catapult that treasure trove of abundance right into the atmosphere just so you don’t have to be afraid of relying on its presence anymore. 

Unfortunately for me, while I was simultaneously being there while not being there, I didn’t notice I was being loaded into a catapult to be jettisoned into an outer galaxy to nowhere. After someone catapults you into deep space, you have a lot of time to think, out there, cold and adrift in the nothing, and you finally realize that you allowed yourself to be catapulted. How? By not voicing clearly what you wanted, or voicing your concerns, or listening to your intuition and facing your suspicions. In other words, you let them do it by avoiding your fear instead of facing it head-on. By pretending everything was ok when every nerve ending screamed at you, trying to tell you something was wrong. Granted, that old catapult may have been dusted off and put to use earlier, but if it had, maybe you wouldn’t have been shot so far out into the unknown. Besides, if someone is just going to catapult you out into space if you get too close, wouldn’t you rather know that up front?

With time and distance and solitude, you start to feel gravity holding you in place again until one day you find you’re back on solid ground. Unfortunately for you, you’re now wandering in a dense forest on an alien planet that you never wanted to visit in the first place. And that’s where I find myself these days, smack dab in the middle of the unknown, sitting on this dump of an alien world and I pretty much hate it. It’s not as beautiful a landscape as I’m used to seeing and I really don’t have a clear idea of which direction to go. Going back seems treacherous and so full of betrayal that I don’t know if I can trust it, and, having been catapulted out into the deep and all, I’m pretty sure I’m not welcome there anymore anyway. But going forward seems terrifying and lonely and I really loved that home that I used to have, even as much as it scared the fuck out of me when I recognized how perfect it was. And, despite its treachery and gravity-defying flings into the nether, I miss it. Every day.

So, what now? Now I rest. Now I take a few sips of water and eat a little snack and figure out which direction leads to safety. Now I wander and find a path back towards home, even if it’s not the home I pictured when I lost my way in the first place.

An Act of Betrayal

As a mystery author, acts of betrayal are kind of my go-to jams when plotting out a book. In order for resentment to turn to rage to turn to coldblooded murder, ten will get you twenty that somewhere along the way there was some act of betrayal involved. Being a hopelessly honest and loyal person myself, I’m always a little shocked at the breadth and scope of these acts; from something as minor as breaking up with someone over the phone without explanation or reason and long past the point in a relationship where an over the telephone break-up is socially acceptable all the way to framing one of your oldest friends for a crime you committed because you are actually a serial killer….there is a rich reserve of human betrayal from which to craft infinite stories.

But why do we do it? And more importantly, why do we do it to people about whom we profess to care??

Nothing rips the rug right out from under you like knowing someone you love betrayed your trust in them. And honestly, nothing pisses me off more. Maybe that’s why I’ve used it as a plot device so often.

You see, I have a nearly endless fuse. When I say it takes a lot for me to genuinely lose my temper at someone, I mean, it can take years of abuse, resentment, and neglect for me to finally explode. But there is one thing that will burn that fuse of mine at record speed, and that’s knowing I’ve been lied to and my trust was misused. Bammo. Full nuclear meltdown.

In that moment, when my eyes black over with rage, every insecurity of mine vanishes, and I will tell someone exactly how I feel–something that if you’ve been reading my blog, you know that I am loathed to do most of the time. In that moment, I’ll call you a dickhead and tell you to fuck all the way off because I honestly don’t care what the result is. I am done. In other words, you’re dead to me.

Not being a killer myself, I, of course, mean that metaphorically, but it’s that emotion that I’ve used to commit all these fun fictional crimes for Q to solve all these years. That moment when love turns to hate and you just want someone gone from your life for good. Like me, most people just block the asshole in question on social media, fire off a few angry text messages, and go blissfully about their day knowing that they said their piece and that’s that. But a few broken personalities will snap, and those personalities are the gooey dark center at the core of all my novels.

Because I want my main ensemble characters to be likable, they are like me in that they don’t betray each others’ trust. They don’t tell other people’s secrets. They don’t cheat. They don’t lie about their intentions. And they always own up to their mistakes when they hurt someone and try to make it right, even if it’s inconvenient, even if they’re busy, even if they’re in the middle of solving a murder, they’ll hit the pause button and drive over to fix it in person. The people in their lives matter to them more than deadlines or even dead bodies.

Take Derek Sharp. Is he an egomaniacal, narcissistic man-whore? Yes, it’s part of his charm. But is he honest about it? To a fault. He doesn’t get involved in long-term relationships and throw around words like ‘love.’ He’s honest about who he is and what he wants and he always checks in with his partners to make sure they’re on board with the situation and know what they’re getting into.

This is why, despite all his flaws, he’s so fucking lovable. Lovable to the point that Q almost sleeps with him in Until the Devil Weeps. It’s why she forgives him in Devil Take Me Down. Derek is exactly who he says he is. He doesn’t lie about it. He gives as much as he’s able to give. No more. No less. And he always gets out before anyone gets hurt.

Aaron Sanger is a little more complicated because he does actually lie about his intentions for a good portion of the series, a few drunken slips in Hebrew aside. But his lies are to prevent a betrayal. No matter how much he loves Q, he would never ever betray their friendship or Ben’s trust and act on it. This is also why he loses his shit at Q when she ends their relationship so brutally because he would never hurt her like that. She means too much to him.

His fuse is like mine–modeled on mine actually. Long and impossibly patient and kind. It burns slow because he understands people are flawed and people make mistakes and forgiveness is healing. But an act of betrayal by someone he trusted more than anyone else in the world? Well, that sends him all the way over the edge.

He turns cold and hollow. He says things that he probably wouldn’t if he wasn’t so angry and hurt by it. And honestly, y’all probably aren’t going to like him much for a lot of these last two books. Because it’s scary to see a kind and understanding person turn into a rage monster…even more so if you’re the target of that rage monster’s fire. Since the books are told from Q’s point of view, it’s uncomfortable to feel that hurt and anger, especially since I know I’ve dished out that level of rage a couple of times in my life.

But Q understands why. She understands that she did something you should never do to someone you love. Something that she had never done before: she betrayed her best friend out of expedience and selfishness. She could have been honest with him and told him the real reason she was ending their relationship, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She couldn’t face Sanger’s hurt or his judgement. Most of all, she didn’t want Sanger to think she was a bad person. Ironically, by not wanting to be the bad guy, she absolutely becomes the bad guy.

And that’s where making it right comes in. Even though it might cost her everything, Q wants to make it right. She wants to fix it. She wants to undo the hurt she inflicted so Sanger can move forward and not spiral down into a void of resentment and bitterness. So they can salvage their friendship even if their romance is over. That’s why she’s a good person and we can forgive her that one terrible sin.

As the series comes to a close, I’m rather relieved to leave betrayal behind me for a while and explore other motivations and plot devices. I hate hurting people as much as I hate it when people hurt me. That’s why I actively avoid doing so. But sometimes you have to stand up for what is right and demand better. We can’t all be as honest and forthcoming as Derek Sharp and show our intentions to the world. But the world would be a magical place if we could.

The Wait.

If you’ve been reading my latest blog posts, you already know I’ve been thinking of the characteristics I have in common with my characters a lot lately. Realizing how much of an extension of myself they are has been a bit on the jarring side, to say the least. But there are some characters I have less in common with. And that’s what I’ve been exploring recently. 

Since the moment I wrote him into existence, I’ve loved the calm strength of Aaron Sanger. There is a stillness to him I’ve always admired. In a world where most characters are vying for the attention of everyone around them in one way or another, Sanger stands apart. Solid and self-assured. Reasonable and restrained.

He’s such an outlier. A serious detective that listens to sad cowboy music in a world of wild musicians who play just about anything but country. 

But he’s also someone who doesn’t speak his mind often. He keeps his thoughts and feelings largely to himself until they absolutely must be shared. And if you’ve read any of my books, you know that everyone around him has no trouble blurting out what’s on their mind. Derek Sharp most especially. Maybe that’s why they don’t get on. Maybe that’s why Derek is so jealous of Sanger. Sanger has a stillness that Derek can never have. 

I admire stillness in people. Maybe we admire what we are not. I’ve always been a bit of a restless wanderer. It’s hard for me to just be. To stop and just appreciate a moment. To take in all the variables of a situation and just be still about it without continuously ruminating on it until I just have to get up and get the fuck out of the house.

I hate waiting for what I want, too. I always have. When I decide I want something, I take the steps to make it happen. Whether it’s coming up with a plan, stashing cash, or just saying ‘fuck it’ and doing it right away, I don’t hesitate. The waiting is always the hard part. The part where I start overthinking and imagining the thousands of possible outcomes my decision will have. Some good. Some disastrous. It’s better for me to just do the damn thing and face the consequences without thinking about it too much.

But when something you want is entirely out of your control, you have no choice but to put your desires aside and just be. That’s Sanger’s biggest talent. Just being. What else can you do when you’ve been in love with your married best friend since the moment you met her and her husband is possibly the kindest human being on the planet?

In the final book of the Clementine Toledano Series, Gods and Devils (Release Q1 2022), I take Sanger’s stillness away from him. Q ripped the rug right out from under him by suddenly ending their relationship in Until the Devil Weeps, and Sanger becomes completely unmoored. The sudden loss of a friendship he relied on more than he even knew was too much for him and it sends him on a downward spiral. All the past pain and hurt and trauma of his life comes roiling up and he has no mechanism to stop it. So, he turns to a couple of old friends of mine, anger and alcohol.

Here’s the thing about anger, the secret that nobody ever says out loud: It feels fucking good. When you’re hurt and lonely and confused, anger feels like power. It feels like control. It’s an armor to hold you upright when your body wants to collapse to the floor and can’t stop crying. It straightens your spine and gives you a reason to keep moving. And when the anger fails you at the end of the day, a few extra drinks numb your real emotions nicely.

The problem with this quick fix for heartbreak is that it’s not sustainable. And if you really embrace the anger, it will warp your perception of the world to the point where it will start warping you, too. This is where we find Sanger in Gods and Devils, just one stop short of Rage-Stroke City.

I spent a good deal of my life being an angry person, so I know what it can do to you first-hand. I’ve spent years struggling not to be. Every once in a while someone will see through it and notice and it scares the shit out of me because I try to hide it so well. I dated someone for a few months a couple of years ago and he saw it right away. On our third date, he told me he could see it, what an angry person I really was, but that I was kind and generous and tried not to be was something to be admired.

It was a good line. But he was right. It’s not your flaws that define you. It’s how you strive to overcome them. 

Knowing how seductive anger can be doesn’t help poor Sanger. He wants to be seduced by it. He lost the one person he ever loved all the way through and just gives up. Lucky for him, Q comes back with a life preserver. But what do you do when that someone doesn’t come to rescue you? You have to become that someone for yourself and that’s not easy.

I’ve always thought daily positive affirmations were rubbish. Growing up when Stuart Smalley was on Saturday Night Live just reinforced my own skepticism. But when your inner monologue is a constant negative voice in your head about all the ways you fail, taking a moment to read the opposite or say it out loud has power. And it works. External validation feels good, but if you don’t internally validate yourself, that well will never be full and you’ll always feel hollow.

It’s strange how often my own life follows as a trailing arc of something I explore in my writing. But as I finish this latest rewrite of Gods and Devils, getting it ready for a beta, I’m grateful that years ago when I started this novel, some part of me knew that one day I’d need to be reminded that anger is not a solution and patiently waiting for what’s next to happen is a viable alternative. The wait is not in my control, but being a passenger just means I get to watch the scenery and be still. After years of giving anger free rein, I’m going to take a page from Sanger’s playbook and just be still and quiet and wait.

A Constant Change

As I wrap up the Clementine Toledano Mysteries that have taken up so much of my inner life for the last eight years, I realize how much my own life has changed during the course of all the changes I’ve put my heroine through. Q Toledano started out as a fantasy. A way for me to reminisce about the happiest times in my life when my daily life was starting to feel like it belonged to someone else. But Q and her merry band of eccentrics became so much more than that to me over the years.

By the time I’d completed The Devil’s Luck, Q and the characters that surrounded her were more real to me than my own life. They consumed my psyche. Woke me up at three AM with thoughts and conversations. At the time, I thought it was a way for me to avoid dealing with the unhappiness in my real life. And that’s probably true to a certain extent, but as I slowly tear down this anxiety dragon of mine, I see that these stories were giving me a safe space to process pain and betrayal without confronting either in my reality.

If you’ve read any of the Clementine Toledano Mysteries, you know that Q is not a person to shy away from conflict. She faces it head-on and doesn’t let up until it’s fought out, resolved, and put to rest. It’s probably my most favorite thing about her. Her words never fail her. Her fear and insecurity never overwhelm her into silence. But there’s a reason for that: I give her the right words to say at the right moment. I give her the strength and self-composure to speak up. I give it to her. 

So, as I finish this series and make the final copy edits to Devil in Exile, I’m wondering if it’s possible to give that same strength and self-composure to myself. Part of being an anxious person is that you’re constantly on the lookout for danger. You communicate from a point of fear because the fear is the steady undercurrent of your existence. It is the constant.

In Until the Devil Weeps, Derek describes grief like this:

“Everyone has been telling you it’s going to be ok. You’re going to get through this. But they’re all lying to you. There will never be an end to this. You are going to feel this every day for the rest of your life.… What gets easier, is how loud it is. You’ll learn to turn it down. Some days you won’t be able to, but most days you will. Right now, you can’t. It’s too new.…. But we’re going to drown that motherfucker out until you learn to turn it down on your own. You got it?”

Grief and loss never really go away, they’re always there like a constant noise in the room that you don’t notice until everything else goes quiet. And this concept of drowning them out didn’t come for Derek, of course. It came from me. 

I spent the better part of two decades drowning out the grief and loss in my own life with music, poetry, partying, cross-country moves, an ill-considered marriage… you name it, I tried it. And because my anxiety dragon grew from that grief when I was a child, the smoke and fear it poured into my life became a part of that steady background noise.

The problem with being constantly afraid is that your body only has two responses: fight or flight. As a stubborn person who hates to be seen as weak or ineffectual, I never back down from a fight. This means my reaction to conflict usually sounds like defensiveness or rage, even though I don’t mean it to be that way. This is also why I keep so much space between myself and just about everyone in my life. When fighting isn’t an option, flying away to a safe space is the only other choice fear will let you have.

After decades of drowning out the fear and grief, confronting it opens up more options. I can ask questions. I can listen to someone without immediately thinking “Fuck, what does this mean to me? Am I in danger?”

But it’s going to take time for this to be natural. Right now it feels alien and uncomfortable. But the world feels slower somehow. I can take in the beauty of the world because I’m not constantly scanning the horizon for danger.

As I was working on repairing the unhappiness in my life years ago, I blamed two culprits: my marriage and my physical health. I thought that if I could just fix those two things, I’d be a happy person. And I wasn’t completely wrong. Fixing those things did make me significantly happier and it lasted for a long time. But there was one more piece to the puzzle that I forgot about: my anxiety.

I’d gotten so practiced at drowning it out, that I sometimes convinced myself I was cured. Now that I’m facing this dickhead dragon and steadily shrinking it down, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to shrink it completely away. I think this is going to take daily vigilance and attention because inattention is where the dragon grows. When I stop putting myself first. When I deny my emotions. When I avoid pain. That’s where the shadows are and anxiety dragons can only really grow in darkness.

To be honest, I’m a little afraid of how much work this is going to take. But I’m always a little afraid, so it’s not that surprising. But each day the work feels a little less like work and a little more like practice. As a musician and a writer, I’m comfortable with daily practice. It’s how you get good at something. So, I’m trying to reframe this as practicing to be a person who isn’t afraid all the time. So far, it’s really just a quick check-in with my emotional state, “Hey there, little emotion, where are you coming from?” So far, the answer has mostly started with “I’m afraid.” But there have been a few conversations that began with “I’m angry” or “I’m tired” or “I could really use a snack,” and that gives me hope.

Self-help gurus have long said that small changes make big differences. I’ve always thought that was bullshit. Big changes make big differences… duh. And I’ve made some doozies in my life. Ironically, I’m less afraid of completely burning down my world and building a new one than doing something small every day to fix the problem. After years of stubbornly refusing to try the small change thing, I’m trying it now. Because this is not something that can be resolved by a big external change. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Everything is change. It is the one thing we can always count on. Nothing we have today will be exactly the same tomorrow. The trick is to make sure you’re changing for the better.

Happy Today

As I continue my ongoing battle with my ever-shrinking anxiety dragon, I’ve been exploring why it took me so long to face the trauma that made the damn thing grow in the first place. As a naturally logical person, I understood on a fundamental level that I was not directly involved in the events, and what happened to others was in some way worse than what happened to me.

My anxiety dragon, of course, warped this all around and had this to say on the subject, “It wasn’t about you, so why are you acting like you’re so impacted by it? Stop trying to make this about you, you greedy little attention-seeker.”

But the thing is, that was precisely the problem: those events weren’t about me, so no one ever checked in to see how I was feeling about what was happening all around me. Without anyone to comfort me when I was a child, my fire-breathing frenemy grew bigger and took more power in my life until I had daily panic attacks from age 14 to 19. And because this was the 90s, being an anxious person wasn’t a “real” problem. Society said that “real” problems were physical abuse, actual abandonment, starving kids in Ethiopia. Feeling anxious and scared all the time for no reason? Grow up and get the fuck over it. That this played along very nicely with the evil whisperings of my dragon just made me trust what it had to say on the subject even more.

When you’re told something that deeply hurts you “isn’t about you” it negates the very real feelings you’re having and by extension makes you feel invisible. I have a lifelong fear of not being seen or heard. And when I feel invisible and alone or abandoned, that’s exactly when that fucking dragon refuses to go away.

The reason I’ve never owned this trauma, shared it with anyone, or even acknowledged its existence until now is that I felt so ashamed for letting this impact me at all when I know people who faced so much worse and are seemingly so much more functional than me.

I work with a man who was among the thousands of refugees who came to this country from Vietnam after the US fucked up their homeland. He sings. A lot. Vietnamese love songs. He also smiles every day. I’ve worked with him for fifteen years and I’ve never seen him on a day where he doesn’t exude joy and gratitude. This man was in a prison camp. He lost family members. He left his homeland for a strange country where everyone speaks a language he still doesn’t understand well. But every day he sings. Every day he smiles. Every day he asks his co-workers how they are and how their families are.

But me? I’m all fucked up over some shit that went down when I was kid. Not war. Not famine. Just good old-fashioned emotional trauma. Unpacking that shame is part of what I’m working on lately. Pain is not a sliding scale. Pain is pain. And if you don’t deal with it, it festers and grows disproportionally. Maybe the reason why my friend at the office smiles is because he faced his grief and let himself feel that pain so that he could move beyond it or at least turn it down.

And the thing is, I’ve been trying to tell myself this in my writing for years. Not one, not two, but three of my main characters faced some kind of trauma as a child or young adult that they hid from the world. And all three of them dealt with it in different ways:

• Q shut down emotionally and avoided romantic relationships until a fucking six-foot-five unicorn appears in her life and refuses to give up on her.

• Sanger builds a family from his friendships with Q and Ben and gives and gives and gives until he doesn’t know who he is without them.

• Derek cloaks himself in a veil of swagger and confidence and never shows anyone who he really is underneath it all.

And the horrific thing is, this is what I do. All three of these things. That’s me in a nutshell. 

What. The. Actual. Fuck. 

When they say “write what you know”, I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean that.

But somewhere in my creative unconscious, I knew what I was doing in my relationships. I also knew it wasn’t healthy. I gave my characters the help and the love they needed without them having to ask because I don’t know how to ask for help when I need it. I always handle it on my own. Until now. Because I am not a character in a book. There is no all-powerful, omniscient being crafting my destination towards the happy ending they’ve predetermined for me. I have to do that part on my own, but I can still ask for help from the people who love me. And the funny thing is, when I ask for help, I get it because that’s what people who love you do.

In Chasing Those Devil Bones, Stanley Gerard tells Q that there are two ways of dealing with ugly things: let them twist you into something ugly, too, or twist them into something beautiful instead.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been doing with my writing. Trying to twist the ugly things from my life into something beautiful. To share the pain of my trauma without having to say it out loud. But saying it out loud is healing and I am so grateful to have a supportive family who wants to help undo the damage we all still feel and loving friends who are willing to take the time to listen. And that’s another weapon I’ve found very useful in slowly slaying anxiety dragons, that dickhead dragon of mine does not like it when I stop and appreciate the bounty of my life.

Recently, my amazing friend at work and I have started greeting each other with “Happy today!”

It started as a joke. He was wishing me a “Happy Tuesday!” and it came out “Happy Today!” and now that’s how we greet one another.

And I have to say that on mornings when I see his smiling face in the kitchen getting his coffee and he wishes me a “Happy Today!” it completely shifts my mindset and all I can feel is abundance and love.

Happy today. I’m here. I’m recovering. I’m learning. I’m growing. I’m becoming a better version of myself. Happy today. Even when it hurts. Even if I need to cry. Happy today because I am seen and I am heard and honestly, how can you not be happy around a person who smiles all the way through his very being and says, “Happy Today!”

The Anxiety Dragon

My old frenemy, the Anxiety Dragon, came to town this week and man do I hate this motherfucker. It’s not as sneaky as it used to be. It used to show up unannounced, kick the front door in, and scream in my face, “You suck! And everyone hates you!”

Now, it likes its sneak attacks. You know, creepy phone calls in the middle of the night… 

“Did you really say THAT in the meeting?”

“Did you notice how your friend kept checking their phone during dinner?? Bet they were bored. You’re BORING. Why do you talk so much?”

“First Born was quiet tonight. Bet he thinks you suck, too. You are a BAD mother. You’re going to fail at this just like you fail at everything else.”

Those 3 AM phone calls are a real pain in the fucking ass.

The problem with the Anxiety Dragon is that it’s been my constant companion for so long, sometimes I miss it when it’s not around. And I’ve gone through a really long period with only a few random 3AM calls for about two years now.

But I never trust those absences. When I’m feeling really good and I actually notice I’m feeling really good and it’s not a fleeting feeling, it’s a feeling that’s been hanging around for days and I’m ready to conquer any challenge and feel fucking great about myself….that’s when I start to miss my frenemy.

“Huh, where did that dickhead dragon of mine get off to?”

Three guesses who comes to call in a hurry.

I have to say that after three dozen years of dealing with this asshole, I’m really fucking done here. I don’t like it. And this extended visit will be its last.

When you’re hunting dragons, any loyal Tolkien fan will tell you, you have to pierce its heart. That beating heart of fire and filth and fear, that’s its only weakness. Inside that beating heart is a jewel, the seed that created the dragon in the first place. Pierce that, and POOF! No more dragon.

That’s actually just a working theory, I’m not quite sure if special swords or battle-axes are involved. My fantasy knowledge extends through four Tolkien books and the first half of the Thomas Covenant saga. But, it sounds good to me and since this dragon is one of my own creation, I’m going to kill it the way I see fit.

I’ve been so afraid of this dragon of mine for so long, I’ve never gotten close enough to it to really study that heart and figure out what’s making it beat. But now that it’s filling up my house and following me around all day every day after such an extended absence, I’ve gotten a really good look at it and I know exactly what made that Dragon grow in the first place and, more importantly, what’s been keeping it alive all this time.

So, this week, I did something I’ve always been terrified to do: I reached out and touched the heart of my dragon. And it burned and hurt all the way through the core of me, but I didn’t let go. I grasped harder and closed my hand around the seed that grew into the heart that grew into the dragon that has followed me wherever I go since I was about ten.

There were ramifications. My dragon roared. Like fire-breathing roars. Right in my face. But I didn’t let go. I looked inside that seed and saw the source. And now I understand.

Like any seed, an anxiety dragon seed grows roots. And these roots formed the bones and the tendons and the muscles and the skin of the dragon standing over my shoulder right now.

A funny thing happens when you tug one of those roots until you hold the beginning and the end of it in your hand. The dragon gets a little bit smaller. Don’t get me wrong, it hurts like a motherfucker. Like your sternum is going to break in two, but the dragon gets smaller and loses some of its power.

There is a midrash that I have been obsessed with since the first time I read it. It’s so inside my brain that I included it in Until the Devil Weeps and am currently basing an entire novel around it. Here it is as told by Sanger to Q:

Sanger cleared his throat. “Before creation, there was only G-d and His light filled everything so completely, there wasn’t room to create anything else. So, He decided to bottle up His light inside of jars, so He could create our universe.”

“Wait,” Q said, confused. “If G-d’s light filled everything, where did the jars come from?”

“They were heavenly jars…vessels…whatever.”

“Heavenly jars?” she asked, skeptical of the veracity of his story.

“It’s religion, Clementine, don’t try to insert logic into it.”

She took another drink. “Fair point, continue.”

“So, HaShem bottled up all His light and created our universe, and the stars, and the planets, and one particularly beautiful planet where He created us. But while He was admiring His creations, He didn’t notice that the jars were cracking. You see, His light couldn’t be contained, and it shattered the jars; and the shards rained down to earth and they became sorrow and suffering. Our job is to pick up all those shards and put them back together. Then there will be no more sorrow.”

“Easier said than done,” she said, allowing the haze of a scotch and Vicodin buzz to wash over her. “So, what happened to the light?”

“It shattered, too.”

“Light can’t shatter, cowboy, it’s energy.”

“Just listen, will you?” Sanger scolded. “When the light shattered and it fell down to Earth, it became the human soul. So, everyone has a little bit of G-d’s light inside of them. That’s how we see each other. We see G-d in one another. I always figured, though, that the shards weren’t all the same size. When something shatters, some pieces are big, others are so small you can barely see them. Some people, like some of the assholes I arrest, they only have a tiny piece of that light. But Ben, he had a huge piece and it filled him. You could see G-d clearly, being around him. He was so at peace with himself. Avi was like that, too.” His face fell, thinking of his murdered brother.

“You’re like that, Aaron. Must run in your family,” she said, growing drowsy….

And I’m realizing now that my fear is just like the light in that story. It fills so much of my universe that there is little room for anything else. I can’t create anything new because the fear extends everywhere. Just like HaShem in that story, I tried to bottle it up. But something that powerful can’t be contained and eventually, those vessels of mine shattered and the fear spilled out like smoke and reformed my anxiety dragon again and again despite my best efforts to contain it.

You cannot contain what you cannot control. And you cannot control what you don’t understand.

Now that I know the cause of my dragon, I know the cure. I know it will hurt and I know it will be hard and I know I’m going to miss my obnoxious companion just out of pure habit but I know that it’s time for this dragon of mine to go away forever… or at the very least, collapse back into its seed so that I can fit into my pocket or under my shoe where I am the biggest thing in the room and it must bend to my will, not the other way around.

Years ago, when I first started trying to contain my dragon without having the courage to find its source, I memorized the Bene Gesserit litany against fear from Dune:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

While I was memorizing this and incorporating it into my Dragon Containment Program, the line that freaked me out was “Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.”

The nothing terrified me. What would exist in the absence of my fear? What monster would move in to take its space?

But won’t be a monster that fills the void. It will be me. My joy. My hope. My confidence. My worth. All the good that is me. That’s what will remain and be able to flourish because it will have the space to do so.

I don’t know what the world will look like when that dragon seed is in my pocket or gone altogether, but I do know it has to be better than the one I’ve created for myself.

Now if you’ll excuse me, dear reader, I have to kick out a houseguest that has grossly overstayed its welcome.

Ghosts and Other Goblins

It’s the ghosting season and it’s got me thinking about our fascination with spirits and the undead. All those ghosts floating in and out of our lives. They’re just everywhere.

Before the modern day advent of therapy, maybe ghosts started out as our memories and hurt haunting us. All those little bits of trauma that like to stick around and pin-prick us to death and fuck up all the good things in our lives.

Ghosts are motherfuckers with nothing else to do but pester the living.

I lived with someone for a long time who I equated to living with a ghost. He was simultaneously always around and never there. And honestly, it drove me mad. The pain that relationship inflicted on my psyche traumatized me so that sometimes I don’t think I’ll ever move past it. But the uncomfortable truth is that I really like being alone. Like it it so much, in fact, that I really didn’t notice how much he wasn’t really there until it was far too late to fix it.

Having reflected on this for a number of years, I finally understand how much of the problems in my marriage stemmed from how much I really do love to be alone. I feel safe when I’m alone. I feel in control when I’m alone. And I love to be in control. Seeing as how I am the goddess of a little universe I’ve created with the Clementine Toledano Mysteries, maybe some of you aren’t surprised. I’m pretty sure there are a few writers out there who can sympathize.

The issue I face now is that I know I feel better when I let a select group of people in. But I’ve never let anyone all the way in. Not one. There is not one person on the planet who’s seen me ugly cry and freak all the way out. I do not drop my basket in front of people, y’all, ever.

Not my mama. Not my best friends. And certainly not my romantic partner. Except once. If you’re uncomfortable with over-sharing, stop reading now, because this shit is about to get real.

I had a miscarriage on my wedding night.

And it was fucking awful. All the stress and fear and anxiety of impending motherhood and the lifelong commitment I’d just made came pouring out and I screamed into my pillow in a Hilton hotel room until I was empty. I didn’t care that my new-eventually-to-be-ex-husband was there. I couldn’t muster up a shred of dignity to stop it. Looking back, I realize now that the pregnancy was confirmation that I’d made the right decision to marry him and miscarrying just a few hours after he’d vanished on our wedding night was confirmation that maybe I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did.

Before y’all start attacking First Born’s father in your heads, the problem wasn’t with him. It was with us. It was broken from the start and it’s taken me years to understand this. We just weren’t a good match. He needed me present every hour of every day and I tried so hard to provide that, until I eventually evaporated all-together and he reciprocated.

When I’m stressed or anxious, I want to be alone. I don’t want to inflict my hurt on anyone. And I didn’t realize this until I was finally in a relationship with someone who had the emotional vocabulary to make me understand. And it is the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had.

Space.

It’s the one thing we’re taught we shouldn’t ever ask for in a relationship. (Well, that and sex with other people). But what if you need space to process too much input? What if you need the quiet of your home and your pets and that little bit of safety you’ve created for yourself? That’s ok; and if you’re with the right partner they’ll even let you take it. And you need a partner who gives that to you. Because we all have our own unique needs and desires and just because the Brothers Grimm or Walt Disney or every writer of every Rom-Com ever never figured it out, it doesn’t mean we can’t all have our own happily ever after of our own choosing.

I know who I am and I am a person who needs a lot of space. Unfortunately, I’m also a person who simultaneously goes big in any relationship to make up for that distance that’s inherently in any relationship I have. If I love you, you know it. Because I don’t know how long I can sustain it before I’m just too tired to keep it up. But I’ll never ask for a break. Even if I need it. Even if I’m on the verge of a breakdown without it. 

Did I mention my divorce, y’all???

And I’ve been working on it, asking for space when I need it. Asking for closeness when I need that, too. But being open about my feelings doesn’t come natural and it’s a work in progress. It’s daily effort and self-analysis. And, honestly, it’s fucking exhausting, but I like to think it’s worth the effort. 

The best relationship I’ve ever had was one in which we saw each other maybe once a week. A take it or leave it arrangement and I don’t know what that means. But I do know it made me happy. It made me feel free. It made me feel confident and whole. It made me feel like the very best version of myself. So, now I’m beginning the think that other people’s concept of a what a relationship looks like is theirs and theirs alone. And that’s ok, too. But it shouldn’t impact what I need or what my partner needs either.

Spoiler alert: Gods and Devils is all about relationships (and stalkers, and dirty, dirty sex, you’re welcome). And working on it in such a compressed time frame has got me thinking about my own relationships and how I navigate them.

Sanger and Q were best friends before they started fucking and that is the bond they miss most when their relationships ends. The absence of that friendship tilts the entire Clementine Toledano universe off its axis. It creates a bigger void than Ben’s death. Why do you think it took me so long to finish Devil in Exile? The heart of the series isn’t Q. It’s Q and Sanger and the friendship they share.

That’s the worst part about fucking your best friend. When you break up, the one person you want to call, is the one person you can’t. 

But sometimes, giving the person you love most in the world the space and the distance they ask for, is the most loving thing you can do. Sometimes, the trust you show in that space is the most intimate expression of faith in your connection. Love doesn’t have to look the same for every person. It’s hard as a writer because I know what my characters need and those needs aren’t always palatable with my readers. I also want my characters to live full and rich lives so sometimes my readers are just going to have to deal with their decisions.

All of my characters are really just a piece of me, though. So, what does that mean? It means I might be comfortable with a little more space and distance than maybe most people might be ok with, but the good news is that I’m totally willing to wait around and continue to love you oodles even when you say you need to some space, too.

The Achievement Hangover

Whenever I’ve finished writing a book, I’ve always found myself slipping into a bit of a depression. I used to call it the “creativity hangover.” When you pour so much of yourself into working on a project and invest so much energy into its completion, it’s only natural to feel a little let down when it’s over.

While pondering the source of the writer’s block that plagued me while working on Devil in Exile, I came up with a metric crapton of working theories, ranging from it was a dumb idea in the first place to I wasn’t actually a real writer and the first five books were a fluke. What can I say? Battling a three-year bout of writer’s block has a way of fucking with your confidence and self-esteem.

The funny thing is that I was writing. I just wasn’t writing as much as I needed to in the book I was supposed to be finishing. Also, and let’s be real here, as cool as it is to know that the copy I write for my day job gets read by tens of thousands of people every day, those are not the words that I wish tens of thousands of people were reading.

Now that I’m back to work and dusting off the discipline of daily writing, I have a new theory about why I couldn’t bring myself to finish Devil in Exile: Finishing that book meant that I was finished with Clementine Toledano.

You see, I started working on the seventh and final book for the Clementine Toledano Mysteries way back when Chasing Those Devil Bones was kicking my creative ass. And Gods and Devils has just been sitting there on my hard drive, largely done, all these years. Don’t get me wrong, it needed a lot of work and some massive rewrites… also, apparently, I used to have a character named Frank who was supposed to turn into someone important to Q and who I brutally deleted at some point?? But I digress.

So, finishing the sixth book–the bridge that would lead from Q’s untimely departure from New Orleans in Until the Devil Weeps to her return in Gods and Devils–would mean that the series was essentially finished. And if finishing a book gave me a hangover, I didn’t want to face the brutality that would await me after the series was done. And finishing Devil in Exile has been the problem all along. I couldn’t write the ending. Which was a new one for me. I usually write the ending first and then tear my hair out for a good six to eight weeks trying to get the second act to go where it needs to go.

The upside of just about every character in Devil in Exile being the murderer at one point in time or another is that my thirty-fifth or so version of it has turned into quite a clever who-done-it if I do say so myself. But it wasn’t a fun one to write, not in the least.

As I struggled with the ending of Devil in Exile, I struggled with a few endings and new beginnings of my own in my personal life. And I’ve realized that hangover of mine wasn’t caused as much by an expense of creativity but by achievement instead.

The achievement hangover. That’s a beast. Because when you’re embarking on a journey that will be difficult, you have to keep your eyes on the reward at the end, the reason you're making that journey in the first place. You have to keep that picture in your brain and hold onto it when you have those moments of doubt.

And when you have a good imagination, that picture can look pretty fucking amazing. Here was mine: First Born and me in a cozy house that was mine with art on all the walls and an explosion of plants on the patio; a sweet little dog that we adored; a day job I enjoyed; a little money in the bank; a healthy relationship with a supportive partner; and, most importantly, a First Born who wasn’t traumatized by the journey he hadn’t asked to ride along for.

Somewhere along the way, I woke up and realized that, by and large, the picture I’d been holding in my brain for so long was the reality that I woke up to every morning; which inevitably leads to the dreaded “Now what?” and that’s exactly when the achievement hangover kicks in.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you already know, that I am not one to sit down and enjoy my successes. In fact, I’ve spent a good deal of my life minimizing them as I kept looking for bigger and higher mountains to climb. This realization was the impetus that jump-started my brain and blew up that block of mine.

Now what?

Now, we write.

It’s almost impossible to work on a dream when your personal life is in shambles. Depression and angst will only get you so far. That’s why so many follow-up records to brilliant first albums suck so bad. That’s where the real work begins.

I realize now that I had to build this safe home base in order to do the real work. Metaphorically, the Clementine Toledano Mysteries were my just first album. The one where I honed my skills and proved to myself that I could be a writer. And this next project scares the crap out of me. That’s how I know it’s good. That’s how I know that this is the Now What. And for me, identifying the next mountain I’m going to climb is the only cure for that achievement hangover. And guess what? I feel just fine.

Evil Tongues

A thief steals your possessions
A murderer steals your life 
A liar steals your reality. 

I’ve contemplated this truism for years; ever since I experienced lies that called into question my perception of reality. Lies so good and stated so matter-of-factly even when confronted with solid proof that it was a lie, I still found myself questioning what I knew to be the truth. If you’ve lived with an addict, you might be familiar with this steady warping of reality.

When you’re writing a mystery, you have to develop a character that is really comfortable with deceiving everyone around them. So comfortable, in fact, that their lies are sometimes easier to believe than truth. In her tenure as my favorite amateur sleuth, Q Toledano has encountered some amazing liars. So, it’s ironic that in her next two misadventures, she’s the one that must do the deceiving. She has no choice.

Until the Devil Weeps ends with a doozy of a lie to poor Sanger and this lie now must live in the core of almost every relationship she has in Devil in Exile (in final editing) and Gods and Devils (in revision). And it’s enough to drive poor Sanger to the edge of madness because it so completely warps his perception of reality. Mostly because the person he’d thought he could rely on most in the world is the one doing the warping.

Why is it so so easy for a simple lie to make you feel like you’re going crazy? Well, that is harder to explain. In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr dives deep into the fundamental elements of neuroscience and psychology that make us so susceptible to loving a good story. Coincidentally, it is these same aspects of our brain that make us feel so insane when someone is lying to us. Even if we know they’re lying. Even if we have incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, it still calls our very existence into question.

How so?

Because our perception of reality is essentially a hallucination. Our eyes are not as good as we think they are. We do not see or hear as much as we think we do. Our brain is constantly running complex algorithms from information it received seconds or minutes before to fill in the blanks. Ever look for your phone all morning and find it right where you looked like ten times?? Well, that’s why. You literally weren’t seeing your phone because in those moments, it happened to fall inside a blind spot of your vision and your brain filled in the blanks with an empty table it saw before you put the phone there. Hence the now you don’t see it, no you do switcheroo. Wild, I know. 

And maybe that’s why lies are so cruel. They call into question the very shaky framework we build our life around. What’s reality? The lie someone is telling you? Or that hallucination our flawed neural algorithm has generated? It’s enough to cook your noodle but good. And if you’re a naturally honest and trusting person, well, believe me when I tell you it’s enough to drive you a little mad. And so it is with poor Sanger. He knows he’s being lied to. He just doesn’t know why he’s being lied to and that’s the part that gets under his skin. Because if the lie is actually the truth, then his entire world has just come crashing down. If it’s a lie, then his world has just been blown up in a metaphoric apocalypse. The man just can’t win for losing.

For Sanger, what’s worse than the lie itself is the liar. It doesn’t matter to him that Q has a very good reason for deceiving him. Because Sanger is creature for whom trust and honesty go literally hand in hand. There cannot be one without the other.

At the same time Sanger is getting lied to by Q, he’s also getting lied to about Q. Cunning little lies designed to pull him away from her. A little innuendo here. A little hint of uncertainty there. Add a dash of caring protectiveness… the diabolical “I’m only telling you this because it’s in your best interest”. And Sanger is getting fed a heady brew of poison that slowly twists him into someone we barely recognize by the time we see him again in Gods and Devils.

In Judaism, spreading lies about another person is called Lashon hara. Literally, “evil tongue.” And Lashon hara is way up on there on the “to not to” list of commandments. Like right up there with murder and adultery. Why? Because these lies are designed to damage. These lies are designed to destroy. These are consciously formed to be cruel. And even when you know they’re not true. Even when you see what’s happening. Well, it’s hard to turn off that algorithm that’s trying to fill in the blanks and tell a new story from which to build the hallucination we call reality.

The words from that evil tongue slip into your ear and whisper all kinds of things that twist you up inside. It’s no wonder you walk away from situations like these feeling concussed. It’s no wonder you wake up at three in the morning with your stomach coiled in knots, thinking “What if I’m wrong and they are telling the truth?”

In that concussed state, you really only have one choice, to trust your own instincts and your own evidence and rely on what you know to be true. Because when you love someone and know them so well, it’s just about impossible to believe a lie about them unless they’re, say, a thousand miles away on a twenty-mile-long dot of sand in the Caribbean and you’re stubbornly refusing to talk to them. Luckily for Sanger, Q returns to New Orleans in Gods and Devils and confronts him with the truth of their friendship. Sanger might know Q is lying to him about something, but it certainly isn’t the something he’s been told all those months she was away in Devil in Exile.

That, my friends, is the cruel and insidious nature of lies. They take away your safety even when you see right through them. Because if you’re a naturally honest person, you can’t imagine saying something so needlessly hurtful and so very, very, untrue. And it’s really difficult to acknowledge that there are people who are damaged enough to do just that.

But Detective Aaron Sanger is my righteous truth-seeker and his instincts are usually on point. And when they’re not? His best friend always guides him in the right direction. There is a reason that Derek Sharp nicknamed Sanger “Spot;” because Sanger is as determined to dig up the truth as a dog with a bone. And thank goodness for him. 

I Need Your Discipline

There is a reason art–be it playing a musical instrument, sculpting, or writing–is called a Discipline. Creativity without discipline is just an idea floating out there in the ether. Ironically, most of us creative types abhor discipline even while the most talented and successful among us is so fucking good at it.

I used to think of myself as a disciplined writer. I woke up every day at five in the morning to write for two hours. I set schedules for book releases and blogs and kept to them while raising First Born and going to my day job five days a week… some days on little to no sleep because some idea was bouncing around my brain and sleep just wasn’t an option.

The truth was, however, I wasn’t disciplined, I was deeply unhappy and unfulfilled. Writing wasn’t a discipline at all. Writing was my life line, my tether, my reason for waking up in the morning. In just about every way one could imagine, the discipline of daily writing saved my life.

Sounds dramatic, huh? But stay with me here. It’s taken me a couple of years to figure all this out.

We’re taught that unless you’ve achieved some level of professional success with creativity, it’s an “outlet”, a sort of brain purge because our uncreative daily lives need some kind of release, as if creativity were some kind of mental masturbation or something; and in American culture, that makes it instantly shameful. And I used to believe that was true. I used to often describe the origin of Clementine Toledano as an outlet for my creativity because making loud industrial music was no longer an option while First Born was an infant.

I’m going to cut to the chase here. That’s utter bullshit.

Yes, I am a creative person, but more than that, I am a person that has built my life around discipline from childhood. I started studying piano at five years old. I practiced my scales and my Hanon every day just so I could get my dessert: the playing music part. Because I wanted to be a better pianist. I wanted to be a great pianist because I needed to be able to release the sounds that I heard in my head. That structure gave me a framework to grow from. A definition to my life. A determination. A confidence that I carried with me into adulthood.

When I discovered the wonderful ways in which digital music could allow me to create, I almost immediately began recording an album. Why? Because I needed a goal. A reason to get better. 

But somehow I convinced myself along the way that my creativity was what was broken inside of me. That my life would be easier if I just did what was expected of me. If I got married. If I became a mother. If I settled into a comfortable career. If I did all these things and stopped putting so much energy into my creative life, I’d be happier. 

But it was a lie.

The further I got away from my creative discipline, the more miserable I became until I no longer recognized my life or myself in it.

There is an endlessness to that kind of unhappiness. Writing was the ladder that helped me to climb out of the dark hole I’d built for myself. The day Clementine Toledano materialized in my brain is the day that I started climbing out of that hole. The discipline of writing every day is what transformed me back into a person I could recognize. It’s what helped me to realize the mistakes I’d made. It’s what ultimately gave me the strength to remedy them.

Ironically, once I fixed these problems, I lost my discipline again… for a minute. Not because I didn’t think I needed it, but because I was feasting on the world and the joy it once again offered. Don’t get me wrong, I wrote from time to time. Picked up my abandoned novel and wrote for a few hours here, a weekend away there. I wrote some really good words, actually. But it wasn’t my discipline any more. That part was gone… until this past summer.

It was joke to a friend. “Let’s record a Goth record for fun.”

My friend didn’t think it was a joke and before I knew it, we were five songs into a pretty decent record for two people who hadn’t made music for two decades. And I loved it. I’d come home from work eager to make some noise. I wasn’t writing words, but I was creating music and there was a goal attached to it. In other words, I had some discipline back in my life and I loved it.

Until life had other plans.

In the middle of this creative reawakening, a hurricane decided to pop up in the Gulf and knock out the power grid in Baton Rouge for a week. And also the Internet in Baton Rouge. And also the cell service in Baton Rouge. When I say I had to go dark, I had to go DARK. First Born was with his father and I was alone, without power and internet and cell service at my parents’ house. But I did have a fully charged laptop. And it was too hot to sleep.

So, I resurrected my last finished draft of Devil in Exile and rewrote the ending the way it needed to be rewrote. Post-hurricane, my friend wasn’t available to work on tunes, because he was working on WRITING with DEADLINES. Because unlike me, he is a DISCIPLINED Writer who actually outlines things (as someone who usually has to playact out her novels whilst pacing the floor and scaring my dog, I don’t quite get this whole “outlining” concept but damn do I admire people who can pull that off).

I don’t know why, but knowing he was doing the damn thing the way the damn thing should be done suddenly snapped me out of the stupor I’d been inhabiting for three years and realized the something that was missing from my life. I knew immediately what needed to be done and I sat down on a Saturday and wrote. Even though it was hard and even though I was unsure. I kept working because doing the work is the most important thing. And just like that, after years of stagnation, I finished not one, but two Clementine Toledano books in just two weeks. 

My old boss wrote a song called “Discipline” once and it’s been one of my favorites for years. 

“I need your discipline. I need your help.
You know once I start, I cannot help myself.

I see you left a mark up and down my skin
I don’t know where I end and where you begin.”

When I first heard this song decades ago, I thought he was talking about a savior. I don’t think that anymore. I think he was talking about art. The discipline is what helps and once you start you can’t help but to continue and when you’re deep in it? There is no separation between you and the discipline of creation.

I’m happy to report, I’m deep in it and have no desire to get out of it again.

Clementine Toledano Mysteries Book 6: Devil in Exile and Clementine Toledano Mysteries Book 7: Gods and Devils will be available in early 2022.

If there are any readers left after my long absence, I thank you for your patience. Here’s a remix I made years ago of that old boss’s song for you to enjoy while I finish editing these books. I hope they’ll be worth the long wait.

More Than a Mystery

I read every book as if it were a mystery.

Maybe it’s because my first favorite books were all mysteries. Or maybe it’s because I’m descended from a man who obsessively read every word Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote. Or maybe it’s because I'm a naturally cynical person. Who knows… The bottom line is whether it’s Dickens or Spillane, Allende or Eco, I’m going into every story looking for clues to put the puzzle together.

And over time, I’ve come to recognize that at the core of every good story is an essential mystery.

Don’t believe me? Then why do you keep turning the pages? 

I’ll tell you why:

To find out what happens next.

Before any genre purists have a literary aneurism, let me explain.

In a good mystery - one in which the reader is trying to solve a puzzle (aka a crime) with the characters (see, I do know the difference) - the reader is motivated to figure out the puzzle (the crime) before the characters. To outwit the villain before the protagonist gets the chance.

Really good fiction (regardless of genre) does the same thing. It tricks the reader into that singular impulse to put all the pieces together and try to figure out what picture the author is drawing.

Why is that important?

Well, just like really good fiction borrows a few instruments from the mystery toolkit to manipulate the reader into moving faster through the story, really good mysteries do exactly the same from the reverse end.

Only in our genre, we use a really good story to manipulate the reader into forgetting they’re supposed to be solving the puzzle with the protagonist. Because it’s genre fiction, this is not a requirement. I have read many a good mystery on a long flight that didn’t have much in the way of a good story. But, hot damn, what a fun puzzle to solve (I’m looking at you, Dan Brown).

But really powerful mysteries… ones that make you explore your own weaknesses and humanity… ones that stick with you for decades, now those are as intricate as woven silk because those stories entwine the puzzle you’re supposed to be solving with the characters with one that the you’re solving for the characters.

(If you’re a literary critic, please stop reading now, I’m about to piss you the fuck off.)

Jane Eyre is a baller of a powerful mystery. 

That’s right, that Jane Eyre. And if you’re a literary critic who’s still reading despite my warning… yes, yes, I know it’s Gothic Fiction and Gothic Fiction usually has some sort of mystery and blah, blah, blah, but (and this is why I told you to stop reading) Jane Eyre is a big “M” Mystery masquerading as a work of Gothic Fiction.

Who is Bertha Mason?

That, is the real story in Jane Eyre. All the rest? The powerful strength of Jane and the evocative language and emotionality of the story? Those are just distractions from the real mystery. 

A mad woman who burns the motherfucking house down while dancing on the rafters. Find me a James Patterson or Karin Slaughter serial killer that is as terrifying and heart-wrenchingly tragic as Bertha Mason.

Go on. I’ll wait.

Ok, I won’t, because I don’t have that kind of time. But I do challenge anyone to find a villain who is so brilliantly drawn from the negative space of her own existence. I mean, we barely know or understand her but the entirety of the story revolves around her. 

Edward Rochester’s everything is explained by her and everything we know about her is based on the characters’ reaction to her.

Now, that’s a mystery.

They don’t come along very often, these big “M” Mysteries. These More than a Mystery Experiences. I’ve only read two and I have read A LOT of mysteries. They’re so rare that they usually get pushed into high literature so quickly that our poor under-appreciated genre doesn’t get to hold onto these trophies. But they are there - books like Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood - and I think very much that they should be ours.

Because in every really good Mystery - whether it’s a fun romp through a cozy village in Wales or a gritty detective novel with serial killers around every turn - there is always the opportunity to elevate it beyond its genre. There is always the opportunity to interweave a good story in amongst the puzzle pieces that the reader and the characters are picking up to solve along the way.

And that is hard as a genre fiction writer. It’s painful and nerve-wracking. When I was writing Chasing Those Devil Bones, I felt like I was so focused on the characters and their relationships that I wasn’t giving enough attention to the mystery. But finally, I just had to let go of that anxiety and I’m glad I did because I love that book. I’m proud of the way it turned out. The charm of it. For me, showing how two people become best friends superseded the crime that they were solving together and I’m glad I let it take centerstage.

Regardless of what genre you write, you are telling a story, and that story deserves its own care and attention. It deserves to be more than the label we slap on it for the sake of the Dewey Decimal system.

In The Devil’s Luck, my main character, Clementine “Q” Toledano, asks her best friend why he refuses to call her by her nickname. You see, everyone in Q’s world calls her “Q”, unless they are angry past the point of reason with her, but not Detective Sanger. He tells her that no one letter could every live up to how amazing she is. And so it is with a good Mystery. No one label can really define what it is.

Don’t let your labels define you. Tell the story that needs to be told. 

Lost and Found

Over the past two years, I’ve lost quite a bit. Most of it on purpose. Nearly all of it with a good deal of personal effort, intellectual honesty, and soul searching.

But even when something is toxic, the absence of its familiarity aches. The comforting cloak of invisibility an overweight woman in her 40s wears, for instance. It can shake you to the core to be noticed again once it’s been removed. For people to smile at you for no reason. To be appreciated for your appearance after years of being overlooked, well, it’s startling, to say the least.

Letting go of unhealthy relationships is worse. That pain holds you to the ground, locking your feet into place, preventing you from evolving and becoming the person you know you wish to be – losing that burden is terrifying. The terrifying weightlessness of it. I don’t know about you, but spontaneously feeling like I’m flying isn’t on my top 10 list of things that don’t scare me.

The thing about an unhealthy relationship – whether it hurts you directly through abuse or neglect or codependency, or whether it provides you with the tools you need to rage at the world or tear yourself down piece by piece - is that it freezes you into a kind of skip loop of doom. There is no healing because you will not allow yourself to be healed by letting go of it.

Even if you let go of the relationship, if you can’t let go of its effect on you, you’re still frozen. Only now you’re frozen and alone and missing the comfort of the consistent, painful weight gnawing at your ankle.

Because letting go is a form of loss. And you grieve for it until you finally take that first step. And until you stop grieving its loss, you will continue to hurt and rage and live in an insulated bubble of your own pain.

When I was a child, my father and I would take an annual hike into the wilderness of the Bitterroot Mountains in my home state of Montana. My favorite hike was Big Creek Lake. Ten miles up a winding mountain trail through old growth forests untouched by human hands.

At the halfway point, there was a beautiful falls. Big, pillowy boulders, warmed by the summer sun surrounded by pools of icy water that was still snow just a few weeks before our arrival. When I’d take off my framepack and my hiking boots, I felt weightless. Felt free. The cool air on my sweaty back, the cold water on my aching feet. It was bliss.

From that point forward, my father had a strict rule about breaks: the backpack stays on; because it would only get heavier every time you took it off and returned it to your shoulders. There is a metaphor in that: We get used to the burdens we carry, no matter how heavy, and eventually we forget that we carry them. Until they’re lifted – either by our own effort or the intervention of someone helping to bear their weight for a little while.

I’ve lost things that I needed to lose. Things that were weighing me down both literally and figuratively, but sometimes, in moments of weakness, I miss the comfort of that pain like an absent limb. And it’s as disorienting as setting down a familiar object and forgetting where you placed it.

Then there are the losses that you don’t anticipate, expect, need, or desire. That’s when your mettle gets tested. When a dear friend falls asleep and just doesn’t wake up without reason or warning. When a little piece of serendipity ends in heartache and much too soon.

And you feel that familiar tug at your ankle formed from all the past pain you’ve let go; weighing you down and holding your feet fast to the earth.

Looking back on my summer trips with my daddy, I still remember the internal burst of joy I felt when we arrived at Big Creek Falls and could stop for lunch before the final climb to the high mountain lake. But I also remember how tired I was. How my shoulders ached, and the horseflies swarmed around my legs. How I’d turn up my Walkman and pray that somehow the Joshua Tree would have some hidden form of frequency-based pain deadening effect.

Until I heard it. The thundering, rushing crash of water, filling the falls and tumbling down the mountain. I’d turn off my Walkman and take off my headphones and sigh with relief. One hundred steps to go. The truth of it is that I never reached a hundred as I counted my steps. It was always much closer than I remembered and it was always a surprise when the sparkle of water appeared between the trees.

As I sit here writing this, I am feeling the discomforting weight of my most recent losses. And it hurts because I’ve felt weightless for so long. But going back isn’t an option that’s possible for me. It’s not my choice, this new weight I’m carrying, but it’s only temporary. It has to be temporary because I’ve grown accustomed to flying and I like it. And I’ll get it back.

One hundred steps. The falls are just around the bend, just out of sight, hidden by that stand of cedar trees ahead.

One. Two. Three….

Choosing the Time of Death

When drafting a murder mystery, choosing the timing of the murder is critical to the pacing of your story. There are several methodologies for selecting the chapter where your victim will be found. Regardless of which chapter you choose, the murder should always happen somewhere in the first act; whether it’s in the beginning, middle, or end depends on your story. Each time has its advantages, so in this Mystery Monday post let’s take a closer look at why you would select one over the others.

STARTING OFF WITH A BANG.

This is the traditional mystery approach. You’ll find it in Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series. You’ll see it in modern mysteries like Karin Slaughter’s Triptych. You must start your novel with the crime itself; which means you have about five thousand words to set it up, paint the scene and leave your victim in a bloody heap.

The advantage of this approach is that you can get to the mystery solving right away. The general rule of thumb is that the more complex your mystery is, the earlier the crime needs to be committed. Killing off your victim this early can be especially useful if you have a lot of potential suspects to wade through or as a literary device to introduce your detective. For example, it’s a crime so ghastly that a specialist must be called in and your detective is the specialist in question. I’m looking at you, Patricia Cornwell.

You might have noticed that I’ve name dropped three of the most important names in mystery writing. There’s a reason for that: it works, really well. It sets up your story immediately by adding a sense of urgency in solving the crime. It also makes the story all about the crime, which allows you to explore the violence of human nature and the nitty-gritty details of how a crime is solved.

In Until the Devil Weeps, I sucker punch the reader with the crime right at the end of a very short first chapter. This gave me an entire novel to explore the effects of the murder on the victim’s family as well as providing a long ramp to build up to a big ending with a shocking conclusion. This approach does lend itself to a certain kind of story, one that revolves around the crime itself and the aftermath, making it very effective if that’s the kind of story you’d like to tell.

THE SLOW BURN.

With this approach, your victim’s fate is sealed smack dab in the middle of the first act and it’s one of my favorites. It has almost the same advantage of killing off the victim right away - in that you still have plenty of time to build a complex case to solve - but it has the added benefit of giving you some time beforehand to build suspense and establish your story.

This is also a great way to use the false flag mystery. You put one mystery at the beginning of the first act and then put the real mystery a little further on when you get to the middle. Dennis Lehane does this masterfully in A Drink Before the War. The detective is sent to look for a missing woman in the very first chapter, but the real mystery happens after she’s found.

Not only does this build some suspense and throw some red herrings around, it also allows Lehane to establish Patrick Kenzie as a detective and introduce the reader to the supporting cast of associates. This is a classic detective novel maneuver. Think Dashiell Hammett with The Thin Man. Or James Ellroy with LA Confidential.

I’ve used it myself in Devil Take Me Down, Chasing Those Devil Bones, and The Devil’s Luck. Like I said, it’s my favorite. It’s a great device if you have a bigger story to tell; one in which the crime is the vehicle for the events, but not the focus of the story. It also works well for a thriller crossover mystery like Devil Take Me Down. The book opens with a serial killer watching our main character; then focuses on our main character’s life, establishing her story; then BLAMMO!: someone dies.

By moving the crime a little further into the first act, you give yourself time for character development and to build up the suspense. The natural tendency for the reader will be to think that one of these characters they’re growing to like is going to be the victim of a horrible crime. It builds tension and adds a little drama to finding the victim, which is what makes it work so well.

THE BIG BUILD UP

This, my friends, is the trickiest of the three approaches because you run the risk of the reader shouting, ‘get to the point, already.’ I’ve only used it once in That Old Devil Sin and I honestly think the only reason it works is because I set up a minor threat of a mystery in the second chapter.

With this approach, your first act is your playground. You can tell a story that has very little to do with a mystery and everything to do with the mystery you know is coming. This gives you all the time you need to introduce your detective, your victim, and your murderer, if you like.

The best example of this by far is Murder on the Orient Express. Poirot is sent on a wandering journey before we finally get to the point and I have to admit that the first time I read it, I did have a couple of ‘get to the point, already’ moments. But once the murder happens, wowza.

The thing that makes it work is that Christie introduces you to every single suspect before we ever meet the victim.

Umberto Eco does this equally well in The Name of the Rose. By taking his time with the murder, he transports the reader back in time and has most of the first act to establish the historical context of his novel.

With this approach, you must have either an enormous cast of characters, a secondary story that is equally important to the mystery itself, or a vast world that needs definition for the reader to understand the context of the mystery itself.

Picking the timing of your murder is as vital to your story as the crime itself. But with a little careful planning and forethought, it can drive your story forward and provide you with the space you need to craft the perfect mystery.

When Life Gets in the Way

Whilst contemplating this month’s Mystery Monday post, my life got in the way. Such is the existence of a struggling author. As much as you’d like to mull over your ideas and creative battles, sometimes pressing matters like a roof over your head and cooking dinner have to take precedence – that is, if you happen to enjoy things like a roof over your head and a warm dinner.

I know what you’re thinking: this is an apology post for not having a real topic for a Mystery Monday blog. And you’re not wrong… except that in the midst of all this life getting in the way, I started to think how often a character’s ‘life’ gets in the ‘way’ of the story.

I put ‘LIFE’ and ‘WAY’ in quotes because A) a character is doesn’t actually have a life, it’s imaginary and I know that and I don’t want the crazy police to come and haul me away and B) because – and this is important – it’s not really in the way of anything.

Hear me out.

You can use “Life Interruptions” (for lack of a better turn of phrase) to do multiple things in any story, but it is an extremely handy literary device in a mystery.

An interruption can place your main character or detective in an unexpected situation that could put them in more or less mortal danger than to which they are accustomed.

A big city detective’s divorce leads her to move to a small town where she now sees danger everywhere yet everybody around her tells her that no danger exists. Sounds like a pretty cool setup for a suspicious death, no?

A small town banker has to go to a dangerous metropolis to help his sick sister. After several events where he cries wolf, a really wolf comes to call and he must solve the crime.

Life interruptions are not just good devices for a plot, they are also good devices for a clue.

In Chasing Those Devil Bones, my main character must attend a funeral. At that funeral, she’s given the critical piece of information she needs to solve her crime. A teeny tiny little clue to push the story towards its conclusion. But the event surrounding that single moment provides an opportunity to explore some of Clementine Toledano’s inner world that the reader wouldn’t otherwise know existed.

I use these interruptions a lot. And if done well, they will enhance the mystery, rather than distract from it. In October’s Mystery Mondaypost, I talked about different techniques to hide clues in plain sight. This device is definitely one of them, but it’s also a good spot for a little misdirection, should you need it.

James Lee Burke is a master at these interruptions. Sometimes they’re as dramatic as a plane crash, other times as mundane as a child’s homework assignment, but they always move the story forward. And that’s really the trick.

You can’t just add in a new life event without it having a direct impact on the story you’re writing - even if it’s an interesting one to you that allows you to deepen your understanding of your characters. While these self-indulgent little darlings are usually some of a writer’s favorite moments, they are also the parts of a novel that will drag the story to a standstill and force the reader to skim through your precious words until you’re back on track with some relevant text.

The bottom line is that even in a genre as formulaic as a good mystery, your characters have to live. And in any life, even a fictional one, life will get in the way from time to time. The important thing to remember is that every interruption must move the story forward.

The Perfect Detective

So, you’ve picked your victim. You’ve plotted out the way they’ll die. You know why they’re about to be murdered. You may even know how their body will be discovered. Now what?

You’ve got to pick someone to solve this delicious crime.

Depending on your process, you may already have your detective in mind, but, if you’re like me, you may have fallen into your mystery with the mystery first and everything else secondary.

A little backstory. I was driving to work one day in the horrible traffic that no city as small as Baton Rouge should possibly be able to produce on a daily basis, when I began to reminisce about my band. It was something I did every so often. Something would remind me of one of my bandmates and down I’d go through memory lane.

On this particular morning, I was thinking about my former drummer. He had this large hardware case for all his cymbal stands, drum throne, drum heads, and whatever kind of accessory a 29-year-old man with a very good job and very few responsibilities could buy. This thing was a beast; and because our bassist lived in Hammond and not New Orleans, I was generally lifting the other end to help heft the damn thing out of our second-floor warehouse space, down the rickety steps and into the drummer’s Jeep. And he made the same joke every time. 

“She was a good ol’ girl, but I just had to go and kill her.”

I think he made it every time, because the first time he made it, I did actually laugh because I was imagining myself into a gangster movie disposing of a dead body at exactly that same moment.

However, after the thirtieth time, it did lose its charm. 

So, flash forward years later and I’m thinking about this as I pull into work and snicker to myself imagining the look on his face had a dead body ever come tumbling out of that box and that’s when it hit me. That spark. That arrow of creativity pierced my brain and by the end of lunch that day I had the first chapter of That Old Devil Sin.

Problem was, I had a mystery and no earthly idea how I was going to solve it or who was going to do the solving. In a traditional whodunit, the detective is as important as the whodunit. And while a mystery can be all about the mystery (see Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), I am not that disciplined of a writer to pull it off. 

Besides, I like my mysteries to have a good story and that was the kind of mystery I wanted to write. 

When you’re developing your detective and the cast of characters that surround them, you have to figure out the world in which they inhabited up until the moment that dead body makes its appearance, even if it makes its appearance in the first paragraph. 

By and large, the crime solver in every mystery falls into one of two categories: the Perfect Detective and the Flawed Detective.

The progenitor of the Perfect Detective is, of course, Sherlock Holmes. A man of genius intellect and few emotional attachments. This makes his personal life rather clean and tidy and it never interferes with his work. Let’s put aside the fact that he’s a cocaine addict and possibly a sociopath himself based on clues the modern reader can pick up from ancillary text in the stories. Sherlock Holmes is, in many ways, a detecting machine. That’s his core function. 

Hercule Poirot is another example. Sure, he’s a narcissist and possibly a closeted homosexual, but we don’t know that. We’re only guessing. Just like Sherlock Holmes, he has no inner world that is open to us.

Even when that inner world is opened, there might not be much there. Let’s take Kay Scarpetta. She’s a badass criminologist, but that’s pretty much all she is. She has few, if any, flaws. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a great character, but there is very little about her that distracts from her core function: finding the killer.

As writers, however, we’re able to explore the human condition. And while having a detective with few distractions and flaws that back up on them while they’re solving the case may make your mystery clean and tidy, where’s the fun in clean and tidy?

This leads us to the Flawed Detective. Let’s take Dave Robicheaux. When we first meet Streak, he’s a low-functioning alcoholic fucking around on his wife with a stripper. Even when he gets sober, his personal life is always getting in the way of his professional crime-solving. 

Will Trent is another great example. The dude can barely read and has an on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again relationship with his childhood sweetheart to the point of exhaustion. 

Or more recently, Lisbeth Salander. A victim of sexual abuse who’s a high-function autistic with a very limited moral compass.

What makes the Flawed Detectives more fun to write, in my estimation, than the Perfect Detectives, is that you get to go off-script. You can diverge from the path of your mystery on a little daytrip down Dysfunctional Lane. You can load your mystery with distracting relationships and offstage backstory that makes your detective behave erratically. You can let your detective leap to the wrong assumptions and beat up someone they shouldn’t and feel guilty about it… or not feel guilty about it; they are flawed, after all.

My detective, Clementine “Q” Toledano is Flawed with a capital F for Fucked Up. And her partner in crime, Aaron Sanger is equally Flawed, albeit in a more staid manner. And their flaws sometimes converge to play off one another. This dynamic allows me to go to darker places than if Q was just a happy-go-lucky musician and her friend, Detective Aaron Sanger, was an NOPD crime-fighting machine.

They get to fight. They get to make up. They get to make each other laugh and hold each other when they cry. They get to drink too much and love the wrong people and jump to the wrong conclusions.

In short, they get to live.

Whatever kind of mystery you are writing, taking the time to really understand your detective will make the mystery more fun to read and, in the end, a lot easier to write. Happy #NaNoWrMo!

The Second Act

As a writer, I have always struggled with the second act. That transition from beginning to end is, for me, the hardest part of a story to write because that’s where the change happens.

And when you’re in the middle of things and you know where you’ve started and where you want to go, drawing that line from point A to point B can be a beast.

I recently read that in the middle - in that no man’s land of the in between things - that is where fundamental change occurs. And it’s not just in the stories I write. It’s in the stories we tell ourselves as we live our lives as well.

The middle is the most frustrating part of just about any worthwhile endeavor. Let’s take house hunting, because, well, that’s one of my current worthwhile endeavors. Looking for the house was part analytical (what can I afford, what neighborhoods do I like, what kind of house do I want) and part adventure. If you’ve read any of my blogs, you already know how big a fan I am of the great unknown. Man, do I love embarking on new journeys, and this was a big one: my first house.

So, when Firstborn and I embarked on this journey, we’d lay in bed and dream of the home we wanted. Lots of light. An upstairs. A bright, sunny kitchen. An outdoor space with just enough room for a puppy. And all these things we honed and narrowed and shaped into the first act of our story of how we found our first home for just we two.

Then we found it. And that first dreamy, wandering first act came to a happy conclusion and transitioned into the dreaded second act.

Right now, we’re in the second act. We’ll be here for a minute. The mortgage, the mountains of paperwork, the undisclosed issues that were unearthed by the inspection, the budget concerns. In other words, the dreaded middle of things.

You see, as any struggling author can tell you, the second act is where a lot of great stories flounder and sometimes die. During my most recent move, I exhumed a pile of discarded first chapters for novels I never finished and outlines for movie scripts I never completed. For me, the dreaming phase has always been the easiest in every area of my life except for music. Music I can finish. Don’t ask me why.

But getting through the middle part, that’s a real struggle. Not because that’s where the work is. I have no aversion to hard work. But because that’s where patience and faith must marry.

To get through the middle, you have to be patient. Patient with yourself and patient with the process. But patience isn’t enough. You also have to have faith. Faith in the process and faith that you are enough. And there is nothing better at testing one’s faith in oneself than the second act of the important stories in our lives.

Because it is when our faith is tested that the possibilities waiting for us in that lovely third act become murky. We might still see some distant happy resolution on the horizon, but it is really easy to completely lose the thread you were so certain you had grasped ahold of when you began.

I once heard a TEDtalk that discussed the source of rage and bitterness coming from optimism. That the most angry and bitter people were intrinsically the most hopeful; and those dashed hopes were the source of all that anger and bitterness. At the time, I thought that made a lot of sense. That the ability to be satisfied with what you have and not to expect or hope for more would lead to happiness.

That’s bullshit.

Bitterness comes not from hope. Bitterness comes from mistaking the middle for the end. From not powering through until you find the resolution that satisfies your needs, even if it’s not the resolution you imagined.

That is the magic of being a writer, though.

Until the Devil Weeps is the heart of the second act of the Clementine Toledano series. The hardest part of any story to tell. I’ve spent years on this novel. I started writing this when Devil Take Me Down was in editing. And I almost gave up, if we’re being honest here.

After the fourth revision and the mountain of feedback from my beta readers, I almost called it a day. Because making all the necessary changes was difficult and time-consuming and ego-bruising and soul-crushing. But taking the steps necessary to make those changes; having the intellectual honesty to let go of my ego and my ambition and my expectations and let the story breathe, taught me more about myself in six months than I’ve learned in the last six years.

Hope and faith are useless without work and patience. You need all four to create any story, whether you’re writing it down, or living it right now. And while those are the tools you need to carry with you, there are also bags that you need to leave behind because they only weigh you down:

ego and expectation

Those two will drag you deep into the mire of your insecurities and fears until you are paralyzed.

I have been paralyzed with fear and insecurity twice in my life. The first time this happened, I abandoned my own story in the second act and the lack of a solid conclusion to that chapter of my life haunted me for years.

The second time, I put aside my ego and my expectations and took a real assessment of what would be necessary to move to a third act that would not leave me a bitter and angry person. And then I began that transition. That beautiful, challenging, frustrating, maddening transition that tilts a second act onto the gentle downward slope into a satisfying third act.

My third act is just over the next horizon and I’ve got this.

Until the Devil Weeps is now available on Amazon.

The Shivering Silence

I have always loved to travel. The adventuring energy surrounding the commencement of a journey is so full of a wonderment where anything is possible. This wide-open realm of the unknown is deliciously irresistible. And scary, but in the best possible way.

Typically, journeys are planned some months in advance to minimize the bad outcomes and maximize the good ones.

But what about those journeys we don’t plan? What about those adventures that find us when we’re least expecting them?

Those are terrifying because any and every outcome is now possible.

That’s what we tell ourselves, anyway. Or, maybe it’s just me.

The truth is that every outcome is always possible no matter how hard we try to control the particular journey we’re on.

When Firstborn was a year old, we went to my family’s timeshare on Grand Cayman for a week. I spent a month making lists and packing and repacking and checking boxes and making new lists. I was a new mother traveling internationally with my child for the first time. Nervous doesn’t begin to describe that shitstorm of emotions.

When we arrived on Grand Cayman, I bought Firstborn a giant ice cream cone while we waited for our rental car. After loading into our car and reorienting to driving on the wrong side of the road for my little American brain, we got lost almost immediately.

After about the third trip up Seven Mile beach and probably the thirtieth roundabout, Firstborn’s ice cream cone made a violent reappearance all over our rental car and the rental carseat. We pulled over on a public beach and I pulled my screaming, vomiting child from the back seat, stripped him down to his diaper, and just when I was about to lose my shit and dissolve into tears myself, I saw it. The endless beauty of the Caribbean Sea stretched out before us just beyond a strip of white sand right off a postcard.

We walked down to the beach, he and I and I cleaned him with warm ocean water until his tummy settled, then we went back to the car and rummaged through the suitcase for beach towels and a change of clothes. We finally found the right turn to the condo and that was that. I don’t remember a lot about the rest of the trip, but that day, I remember clearly. This one epic failure that became a moment of pure bliss.

Six years later, Firstborn and I have taken to indulging in Serendipity Days recently. We pick a destination, make sure we have cash, water, a change of clothes, bug spray (it’s Louisiana, folks), and Band-aids and we just go. The rules for these days are simple: All tourist trap roadside attractions along the way must be visited. Tacos must be eaten when available. And the word ‘No’ (within reason) doesn’t exist.

It’s amazing what happens when you invite Serendipity into your life. It becomes easier and easier to search out. It also starts to find you when you’re not looking for it.

There is an old saying in the music biz that true musical genius happens in the notes you don’t play. As a musician, I always took that to mean Discipline and Restraint lead to genius, but there’s more to it than that. Listening to the shivering silence that exists between the notes and allowing it into your perception of the melodies and harmonies that are filling the corners of your inspiration is what sets a great musician apart from a good one.

I think the reason the concept of pure Serendipity is so awe-inspiring is because it is out of our control completely. It lives in the shivering silence that exists between our chaotic thoughts and regimented daily actions. It’s easy to disregard. It’s easy to say ‘no,’ when there is a ‘yes’ whispering so quietly.

And even if you do say ‘yes,’ the urge to shape this bit of Chance into something advantageous for the arc of whatever plan you’ve made for yourself is almost unavoidable.

Staying still and letting the swell of the Universe rise to your feet to wash against you is overwhelming. The beauty of pure happenstance bliss.

And it doesn’t occur very often. And it’s hard to just be grateful for this glimpse at the shape of the world we cannot see. The world that ebbs around us while we plod along the paths of our planned journeys.

When something good just falls into your lap, we are conditioned by a lifetime of soul-crushing disappointments to question the goodness of it.

But what we never ask, at least I don’t, is how many of those soul-crushing disappointments were of our own making. How many times have we seen the misstep and not the breathtaking view that it led us to?

And so, quite without warning, reason, or the hint of a ‘heads up,’ I caught a little bit of the Universe’s divine light a few days ago. And it’s hard just to hold in my palm and wonder at its beauty. It’s so tempting to blow on it in an attempt to grow the flame and not let it catch fire or go out all on its own. It’s hard not to question why it arrived in my hands and not someone else’s. But that is my task at this moment. My task is not to shape this bit of beauty, it is to marvel at it and experience its surprises.

Because now is my time of devouring life. Now is my time of breathing in every drop of wonder and joy that I’ve been given. This is the time of listening to the shivering silence of the Universe and letting it guide me wherever these new journeys lead.

They say that life happens when you’re off making plans. But life doesn’t happen. Life bleeds and breathes and bruises and sweats and screams and if you’re really lucky, life will lead you to a cerulean sea while you’re holding the human being you love most in the world and it will heal you both.

The Breadcrumb Trail

Once, a brother and sister got lost in the woods. In order to make sure they wouldn't get lost, walking in endless circles, they left a trail of breadcrumbs. Little did they know that as soon as they were out of sight, a murder of ravens followed behind them, snatching up the breadcrumbs and erasing the path the children had created.

Of course, we all know how that story ends. With the two children viciously murdering the old witch who kidnapped them, held them against their will, and threatened them with cannibalism.

Stephen King has nothing on the Brother's Grimm.

When crafting a good mystery, you must leave a breadcrumb trail for your hungry readers to devour as they follow the characters through the story. But, being the cunning creator that you are, you must also obscure the path at the same time. Make the crumbs too big, and the reader will fill up too quickly, get bored, and flit off to the suspenseful stylings of P.D. James. Make the crumbs too small, and the reader will feel tricked because there was no path to follow.

In this Mystery Monday post, we will be talking about crafting clues and planting them in plain sight. Whether through dialog, setting, description, or action, planting clues is a serious mind game designed to manipulate the reader and it needs to be done with purpose and planning.

When I was a child, my favorite riddle went a little something like this:

Sally came home to find Bonnie and Clyde lying dead in a puddle of water on the dining room floor. Broken glass was scattered around the bodies and a cat sat on the chair, flicking its tail. Sally screamed. 

How were Bonnie and Clyde murdered?

This simple riddle is a master class in providing all the clues you need to solve a mystery without providing the one piece of information that would make it obvious.

When my mama told me this riddle at the dinner table one night, she let me ask a series of yes or no questions:

• Did Bonnie and Clyde drown? No.

• Were they stab with the glass? No.

• Were they poisoned? No.

What makes this riddle so devilishly clever is the way the murderer is described: as part of the scene.

"A cat sat on a chair, flicking its tail."

Sounds more like an evocative description to make you imagine the room a little better, doesn't it?

Most people already know this riddle, and if you don't, I'm sorry to spoil it for you, but it's either a clever riddle or an amazing book, so I'm picking the lesser of two evils.

You see the question that I finally asked after a frustrating, teary-eyed eternity was this:

• Are Bonnie and Clyde human? No.

And just like that, I figured it out. Bonnie and Clyde are goldfish and the cat is the killer!!

On a larger scale, you want that light bulb moment to hit the reader as an audible gasp, at just the right moment and with a little bit or a lotta bit of tension crackling all around.

This riddle also demonstrates how burying clues about your killer as part of the backdrop of your story can be so effective.

Say your victim was killed by a hit and run and the killer is the next door neighbor. Your investigator can meet this same neighbor while riding the bus and say something like, "I haven't seen you on this line before."

To which your killer says something like, "Yeah, I'm just sick of sitting in traffic, I see you hop on it every day, figured you must know something I don't. Besides, did you hear about what happened to [the victim], streets just aren't safe."

Now that nice juicy breadcrumb is just a piece of scenery. A way to breathe life into a description of a morning commute, or as a literary device to allow our MC investigator to do more than just "think" about the case.

And this is how all clues should be peppered through your story. Unless it's something you need to spoon feed to your reader (and you probably don't), hide it.

It's amazing how far you can push this technique. You just need to give your killer a function within the story. They can't be that creepy dude lurking in the corner. They have to be a minor character with a nice little side plot going on, something that makes your investigator/MC more human and the world you've created more real.

Because if they're serving an actual purpose in the story, your killer won't stand out. Let's go back to our riddle and I'm going to tell it to you another way.

Sally came home to find her cat sitting next to Bonnie and Clyde; both of whom were lying dead in a pool of water. "Bad, kitty!" Sally screamed.

A little more obvious this time, isn't it? Now, the cat isn't part of the backdrop; now, it's part of the foreground. You're focusing on it. It still might take you a minute to guess, but it's not going to stump you.

The important lesson here is that the richer and more real you make your world, the more hiding places there are for all kinds of delicious clues. Places for your killer to fade into the background noise. Places for your murderer to just sit and wait to be discovered.

This is also why I'm a fan of the ensemble cast. Clementine Toledano Mysteries have a lot of characters and side plots. The reason it's endearing to the reader and not annoying or confusing is that the side plots exist for a purpose. They're not just there for misdirection, they move the story forward in other ways. Same with the cast of characters. They all have a purpose and they all have a voice. Granted, usually one of them is a cold-blooded killer, but we all have our flaws, don't we?

The Destructive Seduction of Pattern Recognition

Human beings are designed to notice patterns. And not just notice them, be attracted to them. Patterns tell us when certain foods will be available. Where certain animals are available to hunt. Where it’s safe to live. When it’s safe to sleep.

Patterns make our lives predictable and firm. And a predictable life is a safe life.

The safety of predictability. So much seduction in just four words.

It is this lust for predictability and this intoxicating attraction to patterns that makes breaking negative patterns in our lives so fucking hard. The logic goes a little something like this:

I know where this path leads. I know it’s hard and I know it makes me miserable and I know the view at the end isn’t what I hoped it would be. But I know it. There might be a better path. There might even be a safer path. But I know this path, so I know it’s safe… and if not safe, its dangers are not insurmountable.

^^^^ Stupid little caveperson brain, right there. ^^^^

I have patterns. Bunches of them, actually. Some of them are pretty fucking cool. I like them. I don’t plan on changing them.

If watching Groundhog Day whenever I have a cold so bad I can’t get off the couch is wrong, well, then I just don’t want to be right.

But there are other patterns that don’t make me happy. And they’re much subtler. What makes these particular paths I repeatedly travel challenging is that the trailhead looks different every time. And it’s not until I’m halfway up the mountain that I finally realize, “Ah, fuck. I hate this path.”

So, having completed my most recent journey up one of these said paths and getting completely turned around and almost hopelessly lost on the way back, I was feeling pretty confident that there would be no next time. This journey was the last one. I put a marker at the trailhead that clearly said, “You hate this path, you big dumb cavewoman. Stop fucking following it, will you?”

And with that, I dusted off my hands and walked away with a spring in my step. No more. Not again. I have learned my lesson. I’m going to find me a new path. I quickly stumbled upon a nice little easy climb. I’d thought about going this way before, but never really pursued it and I thought that perhaps there was a reason I found it again so soon after my blind stumbling through the wilderness of my most recent existential crisis.

“This direction looks new enough,” I thought. “Let’s go this way.”

If you’re a student of human nature, you can guess where that new path started to circle back around to. At first it was subtle, like looking through the trees and seeing a slight clearing in the distance running parallel to your footsteps.

“Huh,” I thought. “There’s another path over there. That’s not my old path, is it? Nah.”

But then I saw it. That first great big boulder that lives smack dab in the middle of my favorite old path and I was heading right for it. It actually blocks the fucking trail, this boulder. Like you have to climb over it or surreptitiously circle around it to get to where you want the path to go. Like it is hard, y’all.

How do I know this?

Because I have circumnavigated that damn boulder dozens of times since my 16th birthday. And every single time, I tell myself that this time will be different and it never is.

Until this last time.

So, this last time, I see this boulder and I think, I can handle this sucker. I’m very familiar with how to handle this sucker, in fact. But I don’t.

Pattern recognition’s seductive hold doesn’t take over this time. This time a big red neon sign descended from the heavens that read:

“Dude. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

It’s hard to walk away from familiarity. Especially when there’s something about it that you really love. But at a certain point, nothing can be as scary as revisiting the pain that familiar, but very unhealthy patterns can achieve.

I’m not going to lie to you and say that this new path I’ve chosen is easier. It’s not. There’s a lot of underbrush and fog and I have no idea where I’m going. But I do know that it’s not up that same path.

It’s a different path.

And just like at the end of Groundhog Day? Anything different is good.