Jane Haddam's Blog

First the bad news, i'm in a physical rehab facility for sciatica.

But the good news is i've put my first science fiction short story up for sale on Kindle, link below!

Sorry it's only for Kindle right now, health problems prevent me from setting it up for other platform right now.

Get it here!

My favorite book in the mystery genre is Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night.

I could go into the fifty million reasons for this in the way I sometimes do for students--structure! form! setting! logic!--but let's be honest here.

Gaudy Night is my favorite mystery because I knew, the very first time I read it, that Harriet Vane was the woman I wanted to be when I grew up.

She's still the woman I want to be when I grew up.

But note the progression--Harriet Vane didn't rivet my attention because she looked like me. She riveted my attention because I wanted to look like her.

No, because I wanted to BE like her.

But give it a second. I'll get back there.

There are a lot of people these days saying that books should diversify their characters so that more readers--and especially more children--can "see thrmselves" in the stories they read.

And I see nothing wrong with that, although I do think that writers write (fiction) badly when they try to create characters on purpose rather than allow them to develop naturally.

What always gives me pause is the assumption that readers will feel cut off from characters who DON'T look like them--that if they read books where all the blacksmiths are girls, they won't be able to imagine themselves as blacksmiths if they are boys.

Now, I have to assume that there are many readers out there who do in fact respond to fiction this way. They say they do, and I've got no reason to think they're lying.

The problem is that I have never responded to writing this way. I read Hemingway and found 1920s expatriate Paris. I immediately inserted myself into that scene in my head, and I was the American expatriate writer on the left bank, just like Hemingway.

It literally didn't occur to me that I couldn't be that person because the model I was looking at was male and I was female.

There it was, a way of being human. It was a very attractive way of being human. I couldn't see any reason not to try it on.

Part of this may be that I was never looking for representations of myself in fiction in any sense. I didn't want to find myself in books. I wanted to find alternatives to myself, ways I could be that were different from what I was.

I was, after all, pretty damned boring.

As I grew older, there got to be things about my actual and existing self that I liked just fine the way they were and had no intention of giving up.

I still inserted myself as Hemingway in Hemingway's Paris, but my version of Hemingway ditched the anti intellectualism for bookishness and ditched all the sports and physical activity altogether.

It turned out that I found rushing about the landscape Doing Stuff that demonstrated my physical prowess even more boring than being a lawyer's daughter in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

And that's how we get to Gaudy Night and Harriet Vane.

Sayers and I--and Harriet Vane--shared all kinds of things, first and foremost a passionate idealization of what I later learned to call the Life of the Mind, learning for the sake of learning, philosophy and history and literature and painting and music and the Great Tradition.

But what Harriet Vane was not was somebody who "looked like me."

She was somebody utterly unlike me in every way that counted.

And that was the point.

She was an indication that there were ways to be in the world that I could aspire to, even though I was not naturally similar to them at all.

Ojay, I'd better stop.

I seem to be blithering.

It's a Sunday afternoon. We have 4 or 5 inches of snow on the ground, melting, and for some reason I put on the DVD of Animal House, which I don't know how to italicize on this ptogram.

I ought to be kept away from technology for my own good.

Anyway, what I've been thinking about is point of view--specifically, writing a mystery from inside the character's "I."

I've written most of my books in 3rd person, multiple viewpoint. Both I and my readers go back and forth from inside the head of one character after another.

There's a lot of scope there, and I've always enjoyed reading that kind of thing as well as writing it.

But even in that structure, it's sometimes hard to get some readers to understand that the characters are not all me--that if one character hates chocolate, for instance, I must hate chocolate, too.

Writing in first person absolutely convinces a big chunk of readers that the character MUST be me. If my point of view character is a dog loving vegan appalled at the very thought of cheeseburgers, I must be too--right?

Wrong, obviously, but that brings up the question of who the POV character actually is.

Dead Letters, the new book I put up for Kindle a couple of weeks ago, is first person point of view from the perspective of Georgia Xenakis, our heroine.

And in many ways, she is a lot like me. She's Greek American, for instance. She had a mother in deep dementia. She wrote for magazines in NYC for years.

But in a lot of other ways, she's not like me at all. I have cats, for instance. I'm unlikely to get confrontational in person, no matter how angry I get. I almost never burn bridges, even when I ought to. And I find it excruciating to listen to the radio except in the car.

Never mind being 20 years younger than I am.

I like her a lot, which is good, since I have to spend a lot of time inside her head.

But I don't really know who she is, and that means neither do you.

I'm warning you up front. It's the early hours of the morning, I haven't been up for long, my eyesight is poor and even worse when applied to screens, and as any of you who have tried Dead Letters can attest, proofreading is not my strong suit.

But I'm trying.

Actually, I should be working. And I'll get to it.

But in the meantime, I've been thinking about something I wanted very badly when I was very young, and that I think I largely got.

To understand fully, you'd have to know my mother. A few of you might have. The rest of you can't, as she died in 2011.

My mother was a wonderful woman in many ways, but in one way in particular she drove me completely crazy.

She was a woman who rated her quality of life by what she DIDN'T know.

I don't mean that she tried to be ignorant of culture or history or even the news.

I mean that she was very careful not to know the realities of things that would upset her.

My mother was one of those women who bought into the great post-War bargain for domestic bliss. She went from her father's house to her husband's, and her husband made a good living.

And he took care of everything.

She never paid a bill, or even knew what the bills were. She had a car and credit cards and plenty of cash, but she was in her 50s before she learned how to make out a check.

My father had a health scare, realized that if he died she had no idea how to function in the world, and finally taught her.

But what drove me crazy was that she was proud of the things she didn't know, proud of not knowing them, as if not knowing was evidence of her success at life.

She didn't have to know them. She was taken care of.

And I responded with a fierce determination to know EVERYTHING.

How to write a check, what the bills were, what the law was, how to travel on my own.

Everything.

So, no, I don't actually know everything. But I have managed to learn how to function in most ways that matter to my life. There's not a lot that I'm faced with that I don't at least know how to respond to.

Okay, I still can't change a tire.

But part of knowing "everything" is learning to accept the truth about it, and today I'm having more than a little truth fatigue.

There is the small truth.

Over on my Facebook fan page, I'm conducting an experiment that has taught me to give all those online marketers a little slack.

Yes, they're obnoxious and they nag people, but it turns out not only that the nagging works, but that it's the only thing that works.

There is also the larger truth.

The world is a cold and brutal place, and no amount of whistling into the wind about how everything has a purpose will change it.

Then there is my ordinary kind of truth.

It really is difficult to get a body into a plastic leaf bag, and that means that the method of this murder has to be fixed.

I'd better go fix it.

This is going to be a little convoluted at first, since I'm announcing something from Facebook on my blog and announcing my blog on Facebook.

But yes, I have a goodreads blog now, and an official facebook page, link below. I will use both to make announcements. The facebook page is more updated at the moment as I catch up and organize things. Link below.

https://www.facebook.com/Jane-Haddam-...