Marilynn Larew's Blog

I thought this day would never come. Today I pushed the button and released Dead in Dubai to an unsuspecting world. Not really unsuspecting. I’ve been posting everywhere and will again, but I did think the day would never come.

They say the second book is the hardest. At least with a series you know where your next heroine is coming from. I’d written part of this book while I was hiding from The Spider Catchers, but I beat myself into getting that one in shape and published. Then I had to choose among three partially written manuscripts - one in Dubai, one in Istanbul, and one in Viet Nam. I really had been in flight from Spider, hadn’t I? Or I could start another book entirely. Does everyone have a bunch of orphan chapters lurking in the bottom of a Word file – the moral equivalent of the bottom desk drawer?

I chose the Dubai chapters, and, never a plotter, I set out to teach myself how to plot. I had a new book on how to get your plot written in thirty days. (Why do I buy these books? Looking for a magic bullet? A topic for another blog.) I set the goal of publishing at the end of October 2014, a year from when I published Spider. Lots of people publish two books a year; surely I could do one.

I started sketching the rest of the plot, inventing characters, finding Arabic names on the internet, playing with Google Earth and the Dubai guidebooks. I knew where I wanted to get, and I began to jot down chapter lines. And then I got sick and was in the hospital and in rehab all spring. By the time I got my laptop to rehab and got back to work, the plot lines had gone slack in my hands. I tried CPR, but it sidn’t work. Once you lose that forward motion, it’s hopeless.

So I tore it all up, metaphorically speaking, and started again. What I published today is an entirely different book. The only thing that remains from the first book is the problem of why George Branson is dead in Dubai.

It’s also a better book. The Kirkus reviewer wrote, “The author’s appealing protagonist makes a welcome second appearance in a story that’s stronger and more riveting than her previous outing.”

Perhaps all the time I spend in the hospital I was plotting something other than how to break out of there.

MEET MY CHARACTER
LEE CARRUTHERS

I’d like to thank D. J. Adamson for inviting me to this blog hop to introduce my heroine to you. If you missed meeting her character, Lillian Dove, go to her website: website:http://www.djadamson.com/blog

The Spider Catchers has been through a number of drafts, so I no longer remember where I met Lee Carruthers except to say that she’s from down east in Maine. She’s the third generation of her family to work in intelligence. Her grandmother ran a safe house and escape route in Paris for OSS during World War II. Her father sold counterfeit piastres on the Hong Kong black market to fund Agency projects in the last days of the Vietnam War. She has a MA in Islamic Civilization from Yale and has been a CIA analyst for ten years, most of the time stationed in Paris. Her job has been chasing black money - terrorist funding and the profits of criminal activity.

She’s a loner, the result of a difficult childhood. Her mother was an alcoholic. She adored her father and brought herself up to be just like him. He gave her first Glock on her sixteenth birthday and taught her how to fire and maintain it. Her heart broke when she discovered he had a second family in Falls Church, Virginia, including a daughter her age with fluffy blonde curls and a face like a little kitten. This left her even more alone as well as conflicted about love and men. She doesn’t much like blondes, either.

She has a skill set most analysts don’t acquire, because her boss keeps sending her in harm’s way on missions like her adventure in Morocco I described in The Spider Catchers. She has enjoyed that until recently, but the impossibility of wiping out either terrorist funding or arms and drug smuggling or human trafficking has left her world weary and a bit cynical. In a recent performance evaluation, she was called “impertinent, insubordinate, and impossible.” He left out contrary, possibly because it didn’t start with an ‘I’.

Note: Because I don’t know how to add an illustration to my Plain Brown Wrapper blog site, I can’t post their wonderful covers. I apologize to them and promise to develop a very sexy blog just as soon as I get Dead in Dubai into editing.

Now on the blog links, hop to meet the characters in the novels written by Dietrich Kalteis and Christine Finlayson.

Dietrich is a writer living in West Vancouver, Canada. His debut novel Ride the Lightning was published by ECW Press in April 2014, and many of his short stories have appeared in publications online and in print.

Book: Ride the Lightning
Link: www.dietrichkalteis.blogspot.ca
http://www.amazon.ca/Ride-Lightning-D...

Christine Finlayson is an author, editor, and former water scientist. Her debut mystery novel, Tip of a Bone, came out in 2013 from Adventure Publications — and she’s now writing two novels of suspense, both mysteriously featuring the Columbia River.

Christine’s website is at christinefinlayson.com.
Link to Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Tip-Bone-Christ...

This week I read in an Associated Press story that the Islamic State, the terrorist group that has overrun much of Syria and Iraq, is holding over 500 Yazedi women under the age of 35. It is not clear what the terrorists intend to do with these women – use them as sex slaves or sell them on the open market. Probably both. There is a lively market for women, and the IS would not be the first terrorist group to raise funds by trafficking in women. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the group I described in The Spider Catchers, not only traffics in women, it traffics in drugs as well.

Although their situation might be described as “a fate worse than death,” the Yazedi women are at least alive, The terrorists beheaded their children and buried their husbands alive.

In in Africa, in Darfur in the Sudan and particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it is not just armies that have got out of control that rape. Gang rape has come to be a tactic of war, a form of psychological warfare that humiliates as well as destroys. Worse, the woman who has been raped is often disowned by her family because she has brought dishonor to it.

On April 17, 2013, Reuters quoted a UN report on rape in African wars. In the Congo they reported the rape of a four-year-old girl. In Somalia eleven babies from six to twelve months old were raped as well as girls four and six years old.

These are not the crimes of soldiers gone berserk. These are crimes of soldiers who know they will not be punished.

We’re speaking here of rapes committed in Muslim lands. Does the Quran permit the rape of war captives? My research into this question cannot be described as in-depth, but what I have discovered so far is difficult to interpret. For one thing the Quran does not have a specific word for rape, a fact interesting in itself. In Mohammed’s day, the most common form of warfare was raiding for women and camels. Perhaps victims of a raid could be described as being raped, but you’d think sexually attacking a woman of your own tribe would have a legal definition.

In the Pickthall translation of Chapter 24 verse 33, the most commonly quoted section of the Quran in the matter of rape: “Forbidden are women already married except those your right hand possesses.” “Those your right hand possesses” is in all translations I have read interpreted as sex slaves. Further the marriage of captive women is immediately abrogated by the fact of capture, so that would seem to take care of that category of captives. There seems to be no differentiation in the text between women who are believers and women who are infidels, but the members of ISIL regard the Yazedis as heretics, which probably means they’re more enthusiastic about raping them.

The solution to this problem suggested flippantly by a male acquaintance was to arm all the women, impractical I would think. My own solution, mass amputation, is equally impractical. But these men are not going to stop raping and murdering just because we tell them it’s not nice.

I thought I had learned my lesson writing The Spider Catchers. It’s probably left over from my other life as a historian. I put myself in a major straitjacket by trying to make everything real. Airplane flights were particularly difficult. Casablanca is the air terminal of Morocco. Not only is it the portal for overseas flights, you have to fly there before you can fly anywhere else inside the country. If I wanted to fly from Tangier to Erfoud, and I really did, then I would have to fly Tangier-Casablanca-Erfoud. At impossible hours. I wrestled with the schedules, snarled, and cussed a bit before the light bulb appeared over my head. Well, duh. How many PhDs does it take to schedule a flight from Tangier to Erfoud? Once I threw away AirMaroc’s flight schedule and substituted AirMarilynn’s, things worked out fine. Well, Kamal got killed, but that had absolutely nothing to do with flight schedules.

I had other troubles too. I kept trying to put buildings where they would actually be, practically giving them street addresses. After I threw out AirMaroc’s flight schedule, I threw out Fez’s street numbers, Fiction, Marilynn, you’re writing fiction.

Yesterday I was flipping through a guide to Dubai, looking for locations for Dead in Dubai, when I came across a nightclub all red velvet and gold. I recognized it. It is in Chapter Seven, crystal chandelier and all. I had written that sequence before I had my epiphany on the road to Erfoud. When I finished The Spider Catchers and returned to Dead in Dubai, I took out the real hotel I had Lee staying in and substituted an anonymous one. OK. The room looked pretty much like a room in a real hotel in Dubai, but it also looked pretty much like a hotel room I have stayed in in Hong Kong. But I had forgotten that the nightclub was real. Now I have to take out a lot of writing I absolutely adore and think up some new stuff. By the way, "absolutely adore" is probably a bad sign.

I’m going to make the club the absolute opposite of the other one, all black and white and chrome. My only fear is for Lee’s ears because of all the hard surfaces.

But I’m going to finish checking out the guide books first. I may not be the only person to create a black and white and chrome night spot in Dubai.

Recently a couple of interviewers asked me how I dealt with writers block. I blithely gave what I suspect is a pretty standard answer: keep on writing. It may be garbage for a while, but you’ll be back to writing good stuff in no time. If that doesn’t work, step away, go shopping, have lunch with a friend, and, in difficult cases, clean the house. If that doesn’t work, I advised, the problem is more serious. There’s probably something wrong with the plot, and you need to go back and find out where you went astray.

That was yesterday, the words of a writer who had never had a serious block. This is today.

Three weeks ago, in the second draft of Dead in Dubai, I added a new and major character. And there I hung, like Balaam’s ass, unable to go forward or backward. A writer’s block the size of the Great Wall of China. It was probably a punishment for my earlier cavalier treatment of the problem.

I thought longingly of doing away with Fred and the Red Herring that goes with him. It would be so easy. I could just pick up the next chapter like a dropped stitch and keep going, averting my gaze from the sagging middle of my plot as I passed by. But I invented Fred and his Herring to prop up the sagging middle of my plot. The problem is that with Fred in the picture, I’m going to have to rethink the whole middle plot and possibly a good part of the end as well. In other words, I’m going to have to think, something I’d prefer to avoid if at all possible.

I tried butting my head against the problem and just kept on typing. I knew I was writing garbage, and the problem wasn’t going away. I fell back and regrouped. I walked away. I went shopping. I went out to lunch. I even considered cleaning the house. None of it worked.

The only thing that worked was – well – work. I started threading Fred through the earlier part of the book and smoothing the edges so the joins wouldn’t show. By the time I got to the middle I knew Fred well enough to sketch where we are going next from the gigantic Red Herring to the final takedown of the bad guys. It’s rough as a cob, and the sketch is very thin in places, and I’m still not sure whether the Red Herring is actually a Red Herring or an integral part of the solution, but it’s a restart of the engine.

“Can you be an airport bum?” I asked him.

“I can be any kind of bum you want,” he replied.

It isn’t Shakespeare, but it will do for now. There’s always the third draft.

I’ll tell you one thing, though. I’ll never speak blithely about writer’s block again.

I fell in love with James Garner when he played Bret Maverick and have never seen any reason to change my mind. The 1950s world was awash with grim cowboys and marshals and sheriffs saying, “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” There were problems aplenty in the Old West, and they could only be resolved with gunplay. Then along came Bret Maverick, con man and gambler. He was handsome, witty, suave, well-dressed, and a first-rate lady’s man. He’d rather talk than fight, but, if it came to fighting, he could do that too. Oh what a relief he was! The country loved him, and so did I.

The Old West has never been portrayed realistically in either films or on TV, but accuracy is not what either medium had in mind. The Old West was heroes in action, entertainment, diversion, a different place to be for a while. In fact, real life in the Old West was thoroughly hard, with long days of grueling work and very little time for play. The towns where most of the films and TV programs are supposed to take place were villages really, just a store, possibly a church, maybe a school, maybe a doctor. Oh, and a saloon, maybe, if the town wasn’t prohibitionist. Maybe there was a sheriff whose office had a room that could be used as a jail. That depended on where the law in the county was. There were enough residents to man the services and a few more. Life outside town either in cattle country on farming country was hard work for little profit. It’s not a place where you would really want to live. The modern world, with all its frustrations, is a much better place to be. But if you had to live in the Old West, Bret Maverick’s West is preferable to Clint Eastwood’s. It’s more fun, for one thing.

By the 1970s the Old West was gone, a victim of the Vietnamese war, its kind of law and order out of date. We didn’t have the luxury of inhabiting the Old West anymore. We knew we lived in a dangerous world, and a different kind of fictional law and order was required for our comfort. Cops and private detectives inhabited television, all of them hard in that ‘man’s got to do what a man’s got to do’ sort of way. The problems were more complex, more recognizable as a kind of reality, but the solution was the same: gunplay.

Into this world came Jim Rockford, a sort of a private detective, a man who lived in a trailer, went his own way, and helped people in trouble, accompanied, and occasionally hampered, by a cast of family and friends and cops. Rockford’s world was recognizably now, but there was a lot of Bret Maverick in him. Hardly suave, but witty, wearing jeans instead of a well tailored suit, perhaps he fought more than Brett did, for if our Old West is largely imaginary we know the violence of the modern world is not. Jim Rockford solved his cases to little thanks and less reward. Maybe that is more recognizably modern too.

Cowboys and sheriffs and cops, and private detectives too, exist in our fantasies to set the world aright, for a little while, but not for long, for the world is too much with us soon and late, and nothing ever stays right for any length of time. Oh, how we need Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford!

So long, James Garner.

Thanks for the memories.

“Everybody says you should have a blog. I don’t think I can blog,” I said to my husband at the breakfast table recently.

He looked up over the paper and asked, “Why not?”

“Well it’s all about opinion, and I don’t have any. Opinions, I mean.”

After he got up from rolling on the floor in laughter, he reminded me that I used to write op-ed pieces for the Baltimore Evening Sun. He also reminded me that I have a long list of people who will be executed when I become Sultan.

“I’m going to expose their heads on the city walls as horrible examples,” I said. “The guy who invented clamshell packaging for one. And the Unknown Caller who calls every afternoon at 1:30 when I’m taking a nap. But that’s not what I used to write about for the Sun. I used to write about terrorism. The topics I write about now are terrorism, money-laundering, the arms trade, and women’s rights. That’s heavy stuff to write about all the time. Or for readers to read about all the time.”

“Can’t you write about something else? After all you do have opinions on other things – like the guy who invented clamshell packaging.”

So I decided I’d give it a try. After all I’m certainly opinionated enough. I’ll be blogging once a week, on Monday, I think, so that I’ll have Sunday to write it. I’ll be writing about terrorism, money-laundering, women’s rights, the gun trade, and other heavy topics, but I’ll also be writing about the writer’s life, what it’s like to live in in a two hundred-year-old farmhouse, my husband’s conflict with machines, and anything else I can think of. I hope you’ll join me.

It’s going to be an adventure.

I've been in the hospital and things have been messed up. Please know that the books went out to the winners Monday, and I'm sorry for the delay. Hope you enjoy it.

Marilynn

See the review of The Spider Catchers ($2.99 on Amazon) and an interview with me in D.J. Adamson's March newsletter. djadamson.com