Sarena Straus's Blog

At the heart of ReInception is a creator who invents a technology to help people, but comes to regret his invention when it’s put to unintended use. In the way that life often imitates Science Fiction, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, who built a neural net in 2012, recently quit his job with Google and now speaks…

Books make the best gifts! Here are some recommendations for everyone on your list. I have my personal recommendations, as well as a few from my voracious reader teenagers. There’s a good mix of some suggestions by better known authors (but maybe not their well-known books), as well as some from smaller presses that are…

Head on over to Shepherds.com to check out my guest blog: The best science fiction novels with kick ass female characters If you aren’t familiar with Shepherds, it’s a great resource for discovering new novels based on all kinds of quirky lists. You can input just about any combination of things that you love and…

As a former sex crimes prosecutor, I think about consent a lot. I wonder, as technology evolves, how that will impact consent and what that will mean for relationships. When we have technology embedded in our bodies, including ones that can record verbal and bodily responses, or that can capture video, what will that mean…

Future Science Fiction heavily contemplates unintended consequences. As an attorney, I think a lot about this. One of the things I imagine in my forthcoming novel, ReINCEPTION, is the unintended consequences of the government controlling reproductive rights. Today in the US, we are talking about our government’s right to determine whether women can terminate pregnancy. …

Asking “What If” is a great way to start brainstorming book ideas. I began envisioning the 2126 world of ReInception while reading the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg at the same time that I stumbled upon an article on transcranial magnetic stimulation. Putting the two together, I wondered, “What if we had…

9/11 is something that I experienced very much alone and have kept very much to myself. Two decades later, I still don’t talk about it much and when I do, I share little. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I was so alone when it happened and because my grief was deep, but it was also relative—it’s something I understood from the moment I watched from my living room window as a plane banked hard to the left, swooped around, and vanished into the second tower.  I watched everything unfold – not on the tv, but standing alone in my apartment – listening to commentators on the news getting it wrong as I saw for myself what was happening. I thought about, but could not bring myself to, lift my camera with its telephoto lens to documents what I witnessed.

Over the next few minutes, I frantically called everyone I knew who worked in the vicinity of the World Trade Center to make sure they were okay or to tell them to stay home. Whoever I didn’t reach within the next ten minutes, I would not know for days if they had survived. And then the phone lines were completely overwhelmed, and you couldn’t reach anyone. And I was alone again. There was no getting in or out of the city. I was alone for days.

And that was how I spent the next few days. Mostly alone, trying to find out who was dead and who was alive. Every day, the Daily News would release a supplement with pictures of fallen first responders. Very quickly, I learned of the loss of Chief John Moran, my law school classmate – a big, funny guy who was in the Fordham Follies with me.  It took a lot longer to find out that my friend Sergio had been lost—he appeared many days later in a supplement. He was the first cop I had a case with in the Bronx and he had just recently joined the fire department when his call came.

Over the next several months, I mourned, mostly alone. Having left the DA’s office several months earlier, I didn’t have my fellow ADAs to seek comfort from as they, too, mourned and waited. I was working in Westchester where yes, people were also shocked, but not in the same way. Not in the same way those of us in law enforcement were. Not in the same way those of us from Manhattan were. Westchester felt like it was a million miles away from My Manhattan. My home. 

Everyone who worked in law enforcement in New York, as I had done, knew people who died on 9/11. By extension, we knew people who lost friends, family, fiancés, partners….So I have always felt like I needed to be very specific about what I did and did not lose that day, because yes I lost people I cared about and yes, I was grieving for my friends and for my city, but all loss is not equal, nor is all trauma. We did not all experience 9/11 watching from a window a couple of miles away. I lost a friend and a law school acquaintance, but to others, they was father, brother, son, husband, fiancé….I have friends who experienced 9/11 from inside or just next to the towers. Whose officemates were killed and who survived only by virtue of running late that day. As far as Manhattanites go, I got off lucky. I knew it then and I know it now. So, I grieved alone. And I tried to be there for others who were grieving more. Sometimes I could and sometimes I couldn’t.

Looking back on it, 9/11 probably marked the end of my relationship with my then boyfriend. He grew up on Staten Island and many of his friends had gone on to become police officers and fire fighters. I don’t know anyone else who lost as many close friends as he did, attending funeral after funeral for weeks and weeks. His ended up married to the fiancé of one of his close friends who died that day—a not entirely uncommon story. I could not fully comprehend his grief, but she could.

My way of coping with 9/11 is possibly marked more by what I have avoided than by what I have done. I used to go to that part of lower Manhattan all the time. Since 9/11, I’ve been back once, a week after the attacks, when the air was still so thick you could barely see ahead of you for a quarter block. Then, there was still a chance that people would be found alive. My boyfriend and I stood a couple of blocks away from the site, but as close as we could get, breathing that terrible air and just hoping. I haven’t been back since. I’ve never been to the 9/11 Memorial or museum. I’ve never seen The Oculus. 

When friends from outside of the country always wanted to go visit the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, I used to take offense to it, like it was some kind of tourist trap, and they were trivializing what happened. Someone asked me, “Didn’t you go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC? Did you feel like that was a tourist trap?” No. Of course not. Last night, when speaking to my friend who worked near the site of the attacks, she explained that such memorials are to give people who didn’t live through atrocities a sense of what happened; an ability to try to share in the experience. Those of us who lived through it don’t need that reminder. I thought I was the only coward who couldn’t bring myself to go to the site of the World Trade Center, but talking to her, reading people’s Facebook posts, I see New Yorker after New Yorker who lived through that day saying they just can’t. That’s me, I just can’t.

I understand that inside the museum is an extensive display dedicated to my friend, Sergio, that was put together and narrated by his fiancé, Tanya. Someday, I’d like to maybe share that with my children and tell them about my funny friend who wrote up my first criminal case with me. I hope it doesn’t take another twenty years for me to muster up the courage.  

We’ve been having such a robust discussion about Making a Murderer on my Facebook page, that I wanted to share my thoughts and a link to the discussion thread here.

Normally, I don’t like crime shows. The prosecutor in me gets too caught up in the inaccuracies and they drive me nuts, but the recent Netflix release, “Making A Murderer”, knocked my socks off. If I’d read it in a novel, I would have put the book down for being too implausible. I know that documentaries are often skewed and not totally impartial, but if even half of what was presented regarding the Avery and Dassey cases is accurate, what a horrific miscarriage of justice these two men have suffered.Guilty or innocent, what happened in their cases was not justice. And even if the story was skewed, the behavior of the prosecutor was completely unethical. We never commented on the particular facts of pending cases when I was in The Bronx, let alone stated them as fact to the public as if the presumption of innocence were meaningless. A good prosecutor seeks the truth and justice, not a conviction. By the third episode, I didn’t even find the show entertaining — it made me want to puke.

This said, I’m heartened by how strongly this show has made people feel, with so many coming forward to have a meaningful dialog about what is justice and how it can be achieved — and what is evidence and competency and prejudice. So often, especially in places like Facebook, people can get nasty or cast stones without much substance to opinions, but here, people really want to understand. Why did this happen? How can this happen?

What do you think? Please join the conversation either here or on my Facebook page. And for those of you who follow this blog – forgive my long absence. I’ve been working hard on my novels!!

 

Alas, it’s been ever so long since I’ve posted on my blog. I’ve been prioritizing the novel work and what I do most when I’m in drafting mode and need inspiration is read books by authors who I think do something that I’m working on particularly well. So here are a couple ofbooks I’ve read recently with authors who’ve demonstrated a particular piece (or pieces) of the craft extremely well.

1. The Martian by Andy Weir.

If you haven’t read The Martian yet, run out and get it fast, before the movie comes out. Weir has mastered, mastered, the isolated protagonist (I’m not sure if this is really a thing, but now it is) with skill that I’ve only otherwise seen in Stephen King’s Misery and that’s about as high praise as it gets. What I mean by this is that Weir has taken his main character, Mark Watney, totally isolated him in a stark environment (Mars) and found a way to keep the reader completely engaged in what’s happening to him. Similarly, King took his protagonist, Paul Sheldon, and locked him in a room with nothing to occupy his mind but his jailer, Annie Wilkes. Mars is Watney’s jailer and just as cruel in its efforts to maim, hobble and kill Watney as Wilkes was the Sheldon. Being able to keep the reader so highly engaged with so few “props” takes tremendous skill. Weir is also incredibly skilled at character development– Watney isinstantly likable, using humor to deal with his circumstances. He’s also clever and resilient without being preachy or inaccessible. I’d add that this novel is really hard sci fi and might not be everyone’s taste, but sci fi lovers will find that Weir did a masterful job of making Watney’s plight credible. Also, for those of you going to self pub route, Weir’s path to success if really inspirational!! Now we can only hope that The Martian is as awesome an adaption to the big screen as Misery was!

2. Undertow by Michael Buckley

It’s absolutely vital when writing YA that you get the way young adults speak right and it’s not as easy as it seems because teenagers don’t speak to adults they way the speak to each other. Along with eavesdropping and watching a lot of the CW Network (which ranges fromguilty pleasure to torture), I read a lot of YA. Frankly, even great YA books don’t often successfully capture current speech trends (plus, they change so fast!) John Green is a master at this, but Buckley just knocked it out of the park with Undertow. Also, this novel is just so out there and campy and awesome, that I couldn’t help but love it. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but let’s just say that more comes out of the water near Coney Island than trash….Also, Buckley’s tumbler site kicks ass!

Other books I’m just dipping my nose into are “Red Rising” by Pierce Brown, “Starship Troopers” by Robert Heinlein (my marine friend said not to let the movie fool me – although I kind of love that movie) and “Blood Song” by Anthony Ryan (epic fantasy). Also, I got the NICEST note recently from another writer on twitter about how my book, Bronx DA helped him in writing his detective novel, set in the Bronx. Nothing like inspiring and helping another writer the way so many inspire me!

So, what inspires your writing?

Here is a copy of the blog post I just put on Savvy Authors to give a taste of what we’ll be learning in the seminar I’m teaching starting on September 15.