Happy Release Day, My Funny Valentine!

When my friend Caroline Fardig told me that Bad Medicine was going to be the last book in her Lizzie Hart series, I was disappointed. Yes, she had wrapped up the Lizzie/Blake storyline nicely and was moving onto other projects. But Lizzie is funny and brave and relatable, and I was going to miss her. Thankfully, Caroline changed her mind! Lizzie and Blake are back in a funny novella just in time for Valentine’s Day!

My Funny Valentine
The Lizzie Hart Mysteries Series #4
Caroline Fardig

All Lizzie wants for Valentine’s Day is for her fiancé
NOT to be the prime suspect in a murder investigation.

Is that too much to ask?


Lizzie Hart is finally living the dream. She’s engaged to the love of her life, Blake Morgan, and more importantly, she hasn’t even given a thought to dead bodies or murder investigations for an entire year. The only hurdle in Lizzie and Blake’s way to wedded bliss is introducing their polar opposite families to each other at their engagement party.

Blake’s parents have thrown a lavish shindig, but the fun is quickly over when Blake’s brother arrives with an unexpected guest, the woman who left Blake at the altar years ago. If that weren’t enough drama for one evening, Lizzie and Blake find the town mayor dead and the detectives on the case put Blake at the top of their suspect list.

It’s a race against the clock for Lizzie and Blake to find the real killer before the police decide to lock Blake up and throw away the key.
This sounds awesome! Buy it here!

Learn everything you need to know about Caroline and all her books by checking out her Amazon page:

Congratulations, Caroline!

The Necessity of No

Uberproducer (and my personal hero; probably yours, too) Shonda Rhimes has a new book out – The Year of Yes. It’s garnered great reviews and hit the New York Times bestseller list. I haven’t read it yet – it’s on my TBR list, of course! – but in it, Shonda talks about how she changed her life when she started saying yes to things she usually said no to. Delivering Ted talks. Going on talk shows. Eating healthy. Etc.

From where I’m sitting, life looks pretty good when you’re asked to deliver TED talks or go on Jimmy Kimmel, but Shonda – despite creating and producing some of the best TV shows evah! – said she was depressed. I wholeheartedly agree, though, that when you want to do something but you’re too afraid to do it, that’s not a fun situation to be in.

Unfortunately, though, most of us aren’t turning down invitations to address our alma mater’s graduating class. Most of us are getting invitations to volunteer for our child’s PTA, take on administrative duties at our offices (which are not related to our position, nor come with extra cash), walk our neighbor’s dog, or stuff envelopes for a friend’s charity. And we – usually begrudgingly – end up saying yes.

Most women I know have busy lives and big goals. They are raising families, pursuing careers, trying to get to the gym on a regular basis, wanting more time with close friends, and perhaps even pursuing a dream – writing, painting, singing. In order to accomplish the big things they’re up to in their lives, they simply don’t have time to make cupcakes for the school bake sale, drive a hundred miles for a second cousin’s first birthday party, and spearhead the office toy drive. Yet women are constantly asked to do all these tasks and more, and often say yes because of societal pressure to be nice and personal feelings of obligation.
But sometimes you just have to say no.

Not to everything, of course. If that second cousin’s mother is a dear family member whom you miss seeing, take the time and make the drive. (Or go up a day when she’s not so busy with the party and other guests.) But too many of us are spending valuable time on activities that do nothing to forward our personal and professional goals. Then at the end of the week, the month, the year, we wonder why we never wrote that book, took that weekend getaway with our college roommate, or got through the Oz series of books with our first grader.

Know your personal goals. Know your professional goals. Then say no to activities that don’t forward either. For instance, if one of your goals is to spend more time with dear friends, then don’t join that new meet-up group. Use that time instead to have coffee with a good friend you haven’t seen in a while.
A close cousin to saying no is the “yes, but.” Say yes to invitations that sound interesting, but set boundaries right away. Yes, you’ll meet your friend’s niece to give career advice, but only if she comes to your office. Yes, you’ll help your nephew fundraise for his sports team, but only through sending a few emails.

One word of caution, though – when you start saying no and setting limits, you’re bound to piss off a few people who have counted on your easy-going nature. Don’t let yourself get bullied or made to feel bad. Stick to your guns. What’s worse than saying a firm no or setting boundaries is to say a begrudging yes, and then do a poor job or cancel at the last minute. We all have people like that in our lives, and they contribute to our feeling overwhelmed.

In a similar vein, I have decided to cut down posting on my blog from almost every week to once or twice a month. With over three years of posting, and almost a hundred and fifty posts, I’m just not getting the return I need to make more frequent postings worthwhile. I’ll reconsider if things change.

This will give me more time to do other things, including reading Shonda Rhimes’ latest, The Year of Yes.

Are the rules of POV changing?

The rules about point-of-view are handed down from old writers to new ones much in the way parents teach their children to play catch or ride a bike. To sum:

First person, or “I” – the narrator is the main character and knows only what she sees or has been told.
Second person, or “you” – usually only seen in “Choose Your Own Adventure” books.
Third person, or “she” – The narrator knows all, but limits point of view to a few main characters to keep things from getting confusing. Almost always, these characters and their points of view are introduced in the beginning quarter of the book, so the reader knows whose story it is.

These rules are pretty much sacrosanct, and to violate them means incurring the wrath of anyone who has ever taken a creative writing course.

This past week, however, I read two traditionally published books that ignored the rules. The first, Sophie Hannah’s The Monogram Murders, is a mystery starring Agatha Christie’s most famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. But Poirot is not the narrator – the book is told in first person from the point of view of Detective Catchpool, a hapless detective from Scotland Yard who pretty much needs Poirot to tell him how to tie his shoes. This is odd because Catchpool must have ESP, as he describes many scenes in which he is not present. Poirot will be having a detailed conversation with a witness, and several paragraphs or pages later, Catchpool will join him at the coffee shop or mention he’s someplace else entirely. Monogram has received mixed reviews, but a lot of fanfare since it’s an authorized Poirot tale told by a famous mystery writer using Christie’s style. Nevertheless, Christie was well versed with the rules of POV, which she exploited to great effect with her debut mystery, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

My library finally coughed up a copy of Jojo Moyes’ After You, the sequel to her blockbuster Me Before You. Moyes is a very talented writer who has used first person, third person, and multiple narrative threads in her earlier novels, but this book is the first time I have seen her break a rule. After You is Louisa’s first person account, and in most of the book she’s preoccupied with a teenage girl named Lily. In the last third of the novel, Lily goes missing, and Moyes jettisons her narrative structure of first person, past tense to spend several pages in Lily’s third person, present tense world. Once this plot twist is resolved, Moyes returns to Louisa’s first person point of view.

It’s been said that a writer has to know the rules in order to break the rules, but I found these rule-breakings jarring. In both cases, they pulled me completely out of the story and left me mumbling about “whose story is it anyway.”

But perhaps I’m being an old stick-in-the-mud. Are writers, editors and publishers becoming more lenient about the rules around point of view? Should I expect to read more examples like the two above? Or did I just happen to catch two exceptions to rules that are still alive, well and kicking?

Best Twist Ever!

Thanks to Deb for coming up with another great idea for a blog hop! These hops are more than just an entertaining way to recognize our favorite stories. As writers, dissecting twists, endings, beginnings, etc., helps us come up with ideas to make our own projects stand out.

Before I get to my choice, I want to talk about what makes a twist work. They are completely surprising, yet supported by everything that has come before. They make readers/viewers feel like they should have seen it coming. They can be summed up in one simple sentence. When they happen in the middle of a book or TV series, they take the show into a completely different direction, but one that works with what’s happened before.

Most good twists center around the protagonist’s identity. (In fact, there’s a whole movie about that very question that Kerrie so aptly described yesterday. The protagonist doesn’t know something important about him/herself, and the twist is the discovery. This includes such biggies as Luke finding out he’s really Darth Vader’s son, Harry learning he’s a wizard (although it happens so early in the series, is this really a twist?), Malcolm Crowe discovering he’s dead, and the entire cast of St. Elsewhere living in some kid’s head.

The Empire Strikes Back was the first time I was exposed to this twist, but is it the best? I would say not, because the clues were just not there. George Lucas could have thrown a few tidbits during Star Wars and the first three quarters of Empire. I have a feeling he didn’t because he didn’t know himself that Darth was Luke’s father. And then he just went nuts, with Leia and Luke being twins and all the head-scratching stuff that happened in the prequels. Thank goodness J.J. Abrams is in charge of the new movie.

The Sixth Sense contains the most well-known twist, and it’s one of the most well-done. All the clues are there that Malcolm is dead – the most obvious one being the desk he works on in his drafty, creepy old basement, surrounded by mementoes on the floor. I have to admit I didn’t get this one – I had heard there was a big twist, and I was convinced that somehow Cole and the crazy guy who killed Malcolm would have some kind of genetic connection. So I was concentrating on that, and missing the obvious fact that the kid who could see dead people was the only person addressing Malcolm directly.

I’ve gotten much better since then. Shutter Island? Called it.

My entry for this blog hop is the much discussed, much debated 2000 Christopher Nolan film, Memento. To jog your memory, Guy Pearce plays Leonard, a man who developed short-term amnesia in an attack that left his wife dead. The police say they caught the guy who did it, but Leonard believes he had an accomplice (the police do not), so he’s going after that guy himself in order to kill him. Leonard writes clues in his body since he can’t remember anything for longer than 15 minutes. As such, the film itself runs backwards, with the next scene happening chronologically before the scene it follows. It was confusing, and I saw several people walk out of the theatre in the movie’s first half hour.

Because of this format, just about every scene contains a twist, and also enough clues that hint at the movie’s resolution. The two most shocking twists came at the end. One, Leonard’s wife did not die in the attack that left Leonard brain-damaged. Rather, Leonard himself killed her by accidentally giving his diabetic wife insulin twice. It was a test, because she didn’t think he really had amnesia. Leonard passed the test and his wife died as a result. The second huge twist is that Leonard had already killed one man he blamed for her death. After that death, he deliberately hid those clues from himself so he could start a new game of find the killer.

With the viewer being completely in Leonard’s point of view, both these twists were stunning (although the diabetes clue had been dropped near the beginning). Yet they follow the rule of identity being the linchpin of the twist.

AMBI Pictures recently announced that it will be remaking the film, so perhaps a new version might be a little clearer. (There’s also a DVD available that runs the action in chronological order.)

Please tune in tomorrow, when Deb finishes it up for us!

Death Before Decaf: New Murder Mystery!

I am not a coffee drinker, but I am delighted to help my friend Caroline Fardig spread the word about her new mystery series, Java Jive! Death Before Decaf is the first book in the series, which takes place in Nashville. I may not drink coffee, but I do love Nashville. At least the TV show, NASHVILLE. I’ve never been to the actual city ….

What it’s about:

Perfect for fans of Janet Evanovich and Diane Mott Davidson, Caroline Fardig’s captivating new mystery novel takes readers behind the counter of a seemingly run-of-the-mill coffeehouse . . . where murder is brewing.

After her music career crashes and burns spectacularly, Juliet Langley is forced to turn to the only other business she knows: food service. Unfortunately, bad luck strikes yet again when her two-timing fiancé robs her blind and runs off with her best waitress. Flushing what’s left of her beloved café down the toilet with her failed engagement, Juliet packs up and moves back to her college stomping grounds in Nashville to manage an old friend’s coffeehouse. At first glance, it seems as though nothing’s changed at Java Jive. What could possibly go wrong? Only that the place is hemorrhaging money, the staff is in open revolt, and Juliet finds one unlucky employee dead in the dumpster out back before her first day is even over.

The corpse just so happens to belong to the cook who’d locked horns with Juliet over the finer points of the health code. Unimpressed with her management style, the other disgruntled employees are only too eager to spill the beans about her fiery temper to the detective on the case. Add to the mix a hunky stranger who’s asking way too many questions, and suddenly Juliet finds herself in some very hot water. If she can’t simmer down and sleuth her way to the real killer, she’s going to get burned.

Praise for Death Before Decaf

“I was hooked from the first page. I loved it!”—Dorothy Cannell, award-winning author of the Ellie Haskell mysteries

“Caroline Fardig brings a fun cast of characters to life in Death Before Decaf! Juliet had me laughing, smiling, and rooting for her from the first page to the last. I can’t wait for more!”—Gina LaManna, author of Teased to Death

“Caroline Fardig keeps you turning pages in this fast-paced mystery set in a Nashville coffee shop.”—Nancy J. Parra, author of Engaged in Murder

Buy it here:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Direct from the publisher!

Spoil Sport: How Spoilerish Should Book Reviews Be?

Thanks to Amazon, everyone’s a reviewer now. While over a thousand people are getting sued for leaving false reviews, that still leaves millions of others who aren’t. I’m not saying that people who leave reviews should be sued. Just the people who leave bad reviews on my books. Ha ha. Just kidding. No, really. I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve only had two negative reviews, and in both cases, the reviewers followed the rules – they were specific about their complaints, and, more importantly, they didn’t give any spoilers. For many authors I know, spoilers in their Amazon reviews are incredibly annoying. But these reviewers are amateurs. Should professionals make sure not to reveal later plot twists?

As a reviewer for Chick Lit Central, I’ve written a heck of a lot more reviews than books. And the spoilers thing is something I grapple with regularly. I generally try not to reveal anything that happens in a book after about the first 25%, which is up to and including the first major plot point. That is usually what you’ll find in the plot description given on the book’s back cover, so it feels fair.

But sometimes something happens after that point that is so big, it changes the feel of the entire book. For instance, one book I read was a pretty fun ride until the last third, when the writer decided to kill off a teenage girl in a casual manner and then have the protagonist make internal jokes at her funeral. This might have worked had the protagonist been a psychopath but not in women’s fiction. Before that point, I’d been working on a fairly positive review for the book. Instead, I opted not to review it at all.

A few months ago, Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies came out with a lot of fanfare, and the reviews were positive. I was intrigued by the idea of a book about marriage written first from the husband’s point of view, then from the wife’s, that didn’t include anyone faking their own death. It sounded good, and I put it on hold at my local library. (Can I just do a quick shout out here for the Pinellas Public Library Cooperative and the amazing job they do getting the latest books and circulating them around the system? And, just, libraries in general. What an amazing concept. Thank you, Ben Franklin, and thank you PPLC.)

Then I read this review over the weekend in the New Yorker. Turns out that Fates and Furies is not the book I thought it was. Not that Groff really needs to worry about losing one potential reader, but I’m taking the book off my list.

As a reader, I’m grateful for the time saved. As a writer, I’m torn. I believe readers should know exactly what type of ride they’ve signed up for when downloading, borrowing or buying a book – especially for someone who’s shelling out nearly $30 for a hard cover. (Which I don’t often do, but am planning for the new Stephen King. But as a writer, I’m perturbed that the reviewer wasn’t more indirect about the book’s second half. Don’t readers deserve a chance to decide for themselves whether these plot twists work? Shouldn’t a review that gives readers the book’s concept, characters, tone, and first plot point or two be enough?

This reviewer seemed to write his piece as a warning: The book doesn’t deserve the positive press it’s gotten so far. And I appreciate that he saved me the time of reading a book that would disappoint me, not to mention an extra trip to the library. But this was the New Yorker, friends. I imagine it devastated Groff.

"I Don’t Know How She Does It" and “A Window Opens”: How Much Has Changed in 13 Years?

(warning: contains spoilers for both books, including their endings.)

In 2002, Allison Pearson made a huge splash in the literary world with her novel about Kate Reddy, a British investment banker struggling to juggle work and home. (Here’s a review I wrote comparing and contrasting the book and film versions of “I Don’t Know.”) Despite the attention, sales and movie deals, nothing since then has been published to such acclaim that puts this dilemma front and center. (Not in fiction, anyway. The protagonists in women’s fiction all have jobs, of course, but these take a back seat to the muddy romantic and family relationships that dominate the novels.) Now, 13 years later, Elisabeth Egan has written something similar and made a splash. (Here’s the New York Times review; positive but not laudatory.)

Many of my bookish friends have raved about “Window,” and I have mixed feelings about raining on this parade. What bothers me so much about “Window” is the same thing that bothered me about the book version of “I Don’t Know” – at the end, both heroines quit their jobs and go part time (in “Window,” Alice returns to her previous part time schedule), making their husbands the primary bread winner. While Kate in “I Don’t Know” quits despite the fact that she’s excellent at her job (remedied quite nicely in the movie), Alice’s reasons for leaving are twofold: she doesn’t fit into the corporate environment, and the parameters of her job have changed drastically. She leaves to take cash register shifts at her friend’s independent book store and dreams about turning book selling into another MLM scheme that so many women get sucked into.

Alice’s journey mirrors that of her creator, Egan, who left a book editor position at Self magazine to edit books for Amazon. Unable to fit into Amazon’s 24/7 work ethos, Egan quit. Now she’s book editor at Glamour magazine. Because of this, it feels low to criticize Alice’s choices, as they clearly mirror the writer’s own. Still, shouldn’t fiction offer readers the chance to experience a world as it might be, rather than the world as it is?

In many ways, Alice has it easier than Kate. Her nanny is amazing, (Kate’s was constantly late) and her children cute and pleasant (Kate’s daughter was manipulative and judgmental). Yes, her father is dying, but her parents are well-off enough that they offer her great sums of money when her husband decides to open his own law practice after failing to make partner and being forced out of his firm. And her mother is healthy enough that Alice really only misses a few hours of work one day to accompany them to an appointment. Mom does the heavy lifting of the care taking. Alice’s husband is spending more time with the bottle than paying clients, but he and the nanny are home for the kids, except one time when Alice’s daughter gets sick. Other than that, she’s in the office and available … to do what, though? Alice works at Scroll, which will someday be a book store where readers will hook up their Kindle-like devices and read on the premises while enjoying massagers and bon-bons in the company of gorgeous first editions. Her job is to get literary agents and editors on board. She sets up and attends some meetings, but it’s really hard to see what about her job is so all-consuming. There are tons of emails and staff meetings, but I couldn’t figure out what Alice did all day and why she was so stressed out – other than the stress of dealing with some difficult personalities at work, which is pretty much par for the course for anyone who pulls in a paycheck.

The beginning of the end comes for Alice when Greg, one of the company owners, want to incorporate video games for the kids in the Scroll space. The company has just acquired a game manufacturer, and Greg envisions the kids playing games while their mothers read. Of course, this will require a re-envisioning of what Scroll will physically look like, and changes to Alice’s job as well. Alice balks because she doesn’t believe kids should play video games, and some of the games in the catalog are especially violent. Instead, later, she pitches her “book lady” idea to Greg – home parties where women would introduce a few new titles to their friends. (I liked this idea a lot, and of course if “book lady” were real, it would be the one MLM I’d actually sign up to join. But it obviously wasn’t appropriate for this corporation.) I was sorely disappointed in this plot twist. Adding video games to the store makes sense – it would enable parents to stay that much longer and buy more “merch.” The biggest wrinkle would be angry mothers who caught their kids playing inappropriate games. Had Alice brought up that point – and then proposed publishing a guide to the games so parents could monitor their kids’ choices – she would have scored big points with the boss. Instead, nothing.

I wanted to see Alice overcome these stumbling blocks and lead the New York office of Scroll. Barring that, couldn’t she have used her contacts in the publishing world to obtain an editing or publicist position? If not, why not end the book with Alice turning “Book Lady” into this year’s “Pampered Chef”?

Again, this is not to point fingers at Egan, who has obviously made the best of a bad fit with Amazon. But I am so tired of reading fiction that still – in 2015! – has a woman’s happy ending consist of slinking quietly away from the big bad job and the meanies at work in order to spend more time with the kids and let her husband and his job take center stage. It was so gratifying, in the movie version of “I Don’t Know”, to watch Kate march into her boss’ office and finally set limits, and then have her husband willingly take mental responsibility for their household.

Of course, women’s fiction is fiction. And there’s no category called women’s fantasy. If there were, it would probably have more to do with hot firemen, anyway. But is it too much to ask that the female protagonists of this genre be able to accomplish what in real life we cannot?

I hope Egan’s success opens the door to many more women’s fiction novels featuring married heroines with full lives, including career conflicts, dealing with children, etc. And I’m so glad she’s getting this attention. Even if we cannot get the career happy ending we’re hoping for, at least there will be more books to choose from.