An open thank-you note to Edgars judges

(The nominees for the 2008 Edgar Awards were recently announced. Congratulations to them all!)

Dear folks,

Thank you for your incredibly hard work over the past year. Recently, I had the privilege of serving on a Best Novel committee, so I know what the job entails. It is an honor to be asked to participate, and it is an unparallelled opportunity to immerse yourself in the work of the field. I thought of it as a masters class in crime fiction and that proved to be the case.

I don’t need to tell you, it was also a serious amount of work. In some cases, you had to allocate large amounts of space in your home to house the books—on the order of 500+ for Best Novel—and real estate is a consideration that probably didn’t occur to you until the process was already underway. Like me, you probably had to come up with an organizational system so you could find books under discussion, keep track of what titles you had and had not received, and then keep track of your opinions of the work. There’s also the organization of the teams, and the tireless work of the chairs in wrangling the judging process itself. The paperwork, the email, and the books take over your home and your life. Spouses and family members probably spoke longingly of free weekends and reclaiming the dining room at the same moment you were signing for boxes from FedEx, UPS, and DHL, each containing at least 25 books.

It was all in the name of an excellent cause, as you well know. You took on the role as a service to the crime fiction community. You gave up a year of your writing life—probably a bit more, near the end, reading and thinking well into the night—and probably you worked this around a day job, book promotion, private life, and myriad other things. But it’s so very worth it. I got to read widely across nearly every subgenre in crime fiction. I was introduced to authors I didn’t know and needed to. I got to know the folks on my team, who were thoughtful, educated, opinionated, honorable, professional writers, all of whom were dedicated to making our short list of nominees and winner the very best possible. I believed that acting as a judge is partial payback for the support I’ve received from the mystery community and an opportunity to make MWA stronger in its representation of us, our work, and our readers.

I’ll bet that inevitably, when discussion of the books came up, individual tastes came into play. So did the determination of what “mystery” and even “novel” means. But in my experience, and from what I’ve heard from my friends who also served, most personal differences are set aside and civil—not to say cool—discussions followed. These were not simple, easy choices we made. It is not an easy thing to love a book that others don’t care for. You wish you could have a short list of ten, twenty, fifty, and still there would be excellent books left unmentioned.

And always, always, it seems there will come a perfect storm of dissatisfaction after every nomination announcement. Personal favorites were left off the list. Popular books were left out. Bestsellers were left off or over-represented. One genre or gender was ignored or favored and when politics comes into the discussion, spitting and hissing ensues. Yes, there are biases at the cultural and industry level; that may be why you signed on, to consider and try to think past it. Lots of folks, in the sturm und drang after the nominations are announced, remind us to congratulate the nominees. A few might remember what the judges try to do, so fairly, in such a complex situation.

Last year, there were three women nominated, and three men. Americans and Europeans. Their books had contemporary and historical settings and were written in styles ranging from the traditional to the gritty to the political. They were all excellent mysteries and wonderfully written. You’d think that this would be about the most balanced mix you could hope for, right?

I think so. But people still kvetched. And people will kvetch every year. That’s fine, kvetch away. Some years I don’t know the nominees, sometimes I don’t agree with the choices, sometimes I ADORE them. But I know, every year, that the Edgars judges work their butts off, juggling their personal preferences with their opinions as writers and readers (for we were all readers and lovers of mysteries, first) while trying to listen hard to the arguments of the rest of the committee. Taste, opinions, rules. It’s not an easy path to navigate.

So please allow me to thank you for taking the time to do this work. And to thank the MWA Board and Committees who try, every year, to keep the faith and honor the best work in the community.

The "BR Pile"

This is me trying something new.  You will, I hope, have noticed I’ve started listing what I’ve got on my TBR (to be read) pile on the home page of this site.   My plan is to do a brief review of the book the next time I blog, thus moving them to the “been read pile.”  Last year at Edgars Week, I really liked what Stephen King said about writing four hours a day and reading four hours a day.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to manage that, but I like the idea of trying.  And I’d like to blog more often than I do.  The reviews won’t be long, a couple of sentences, but I’ll tell you whether I enjoyed it, thought another book did it better, etc.  I’d like to hear what you think, too. 

So by taking the things I’ve been reading, then writing about them, I’ll get through the ginormous pile of books I have TBR, and maybe turn you on to a subject or writer that you haven’t met before.  Here goes.

Valerie Plame Wilson, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House 

I probably don’t have to tell you that this was Valerie Plame Wilson’s account of how her name was leaked to the public while she was a covert officer for the CIA.  You’ll remember the news:  think Scooter Libby, yellowcake uranium from Nigeria, the sixteen words, the Iraqi war.  It was interesting to compare this book (and its redactions) to other books, including Lindsay Moran’s book Blowing my Cover:  My Life as a CIA Spy, and The Politics of Truth, by Wilson’s husband Joseph Wilson.  I was reading it primarily as part of my research on how spying works, but I found it much more useful as an examination of current events.  She’s very careful to document her arguments—she’s had to be—and I was convinced.  This is a case of a person who’d worked hard to serve her country, and then was exposed as a political retaliation.  

Susanna Jones, The Missing Person’s Guide to Love

I met Susanna years ago, and I’m hooked on her work.  Her other award-winning novels (The Earthquake Bird and Water Lily) are entrancing, beautifully written, and, well, creepy.  You’re increasingly unnerved while you read them and slowly learn that things aren’t quite as the narrator understands—or wants—them to be, yet you can’t set them aside.  In this one, a young woman leaves Turkey for the funeral of a friend she hasn’t seen in years, one with whom she was convicted in an arson case as teenagers.  The story’s reality unravels as she tries to find out what happened to a girl who vanished just before. 

Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner, eds., Many Bloody Returns

An anthology of vampire stories with birthdays as the theme.  What I particularly liked about this was that I got to see mystery-writing friends tackle vampires as characters (if they hadn’t already) and I got to check out some great writers from the supernatural and urban fantasy world.  I admit, I’m a sucker (oh, dear, really didn’t mean that) for collections and anthologies, because of the sample factor and you learn new authors to check out.  The cool thing about this experiment is that each author offered a completely different interpretation of “birthday” means to vampires.  Love that.  This New York Times bestseller will be followed by Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, to which I’ll be contributing a story.

Gary Paulsen,  Hatchet

This is one of the books recommended to me by my friends in Takotna, Alaska.  A boy travelling to visit his father is stranded alone when the small plane he’s in crashes.  Brian has to survive with the clothes on his back and the hatchet his mother gave him.  This is a YA story, and I found some of the situations a little grim at times (okay, I never should have seen The Lion King, and am told to avoid Bambi)  but what I loved was that Brian drew from common sense, logic, and his suburban upbringing—TV, rides in the park, school classes—to survive.  Stay calm.  Don’t feel sorry for yourself.  Keep busy.  Make a plan.  Be mindful, because a tiny mistake in the wilderness can kill you.  There are worse lessons to take away from a book.

Surprise!

I’m a red-head again.  Well, kinda.  But I did finally get my hair done and that was loooong overdue.

No, that’s not it.  But there is something different…

Oh, the web site!

Yep.  New year.  New projects.  New web site.

Hot new look.  Same quality posts.  Same up-to-the-minute news.  Same low, low price.

But wait, there’s more!  There are a few new features.  Check out the front page, for example, to see what I’m reading and listening to these days.  And I’ve updated the FAQs and the “About” page.

I’ll also be adding some new pages as time allows.  I’m planning on incorporating a section “For Writers” and adding readers guides to the “Books” page.  I’ll let you know when they’re up and running.  Watch this space.

Thanks to Mr. G for another groovy implementation.  Thanks to Janet Reid for her boffo comments.

 

Year's End 2007

December is all a bit of a blur. It started off with a lot of business and a lot of fun; the annual Holiday Party at Kate’s Mystery Books was in full swing (l. Raven winner Kate herself, below, me, Toni Kelner and her daughter Maggie). It was also an opportunity to load up on more books, which…isn’t really a problem for me (or for you, I suspect).

I also made a quick trip to New York, and then spent the rest of the month editing my werewolf story ("The Night Things Changed") for Wolfsbane and Mistletoe (edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner, coming October 2008!) and revising Exit Interview. Then Christmas came along and it was as though we were making up for me being a hermit the past two years. Christmas Eve, we hosted about twenty people. Christmas Day, we went to two parties. December 26: breakfast with friends. December 27, 28, 29: dinner with friends each night. December December 30, drinks with friends. December 31, curled up in a ball and consumed large amounts of fondue.

Okay, consider me caught up.

During the rest of that week....

There was lots of cooking and cleaning.


There was some writing.


There was time for fun with puzzles.


There were a few trips to the gym, but there was more consumption of cheese and champagne.



And now back to work.

Here’s wishing you all the best in 2008!

(Thanks to Toni for the cool BSG action figures and to Charlaine for the puzzle!)