Dare to Dream

DARE to DREAM with Jason Henry…

Building on a groundswell in the New York Chapter of MWA, as chronicled by our own beloved Annamaria Alfieri on the official MWA website, added to by comments of CWC members Sheila York, Thelma Straw and others, bonding with the brand new pristine white T-shirts worn to Deadly Ink this very week by members of Crime Writer's Chronicle, I present another member of the growing mystery community of conferences — Jason Henry, of Colorado Springs, the Director of the Pikes Peak Writers Conference for April 15-17, 2016!

DARE to DREAM is the appropriate title of this friendly gathering at the Colorado Springs Marriott.

In his welcome Jason writes… to each of us writers… "Dreams are the foundation of the world we live in… together, we'll Dare to Dream!"

You and I all started with our little dreams - some became huge and famous, some are still in the womb stages... all are wonderful… they are YOU and ME and all our writer friends and colleagues!

Welcome to Jason Henry!

Thelma Straw

P.S. I admit I have a fond memory re Colorado Springs, as I was privileged to direct their YWCA Camp one summer a zillion years ago ! God's country, that land!

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For me, being a writer is a relatively new idea in the grand scheme of things. In fact, the crazy notion didn’t occur to me until, roughly, seven years ago, and I only began taking it seriously in the last five. I suppose there are many reasons why I was a late literary bloomer, but I don’t think those excuses are overly relevant.

I made it.

I’m here.

You see, having been born into small town, Ohio, my horizons as a youngster didn’t appear to be very broad. I was faced with a future as a farmer, a factory worker, or, if my beloved grandmother had her way, I would grow to become a preacher. (Sorry, Grandma. I am an epic fail with that one!) Despite my hometown, I, like all kids, still had fanciful dreams. You know, the usual; a lion tamer, a snake charmer, or Batman.

At the age of nine, I became an Army brat. I was whisked away from Ohio and moved from one location to the next as my step-father’s job dictated. With every move, my horizons broadened and my dreams grew. The world was a much bigger place than small town, Ohio would have me believe. As my view of the world expanded, so did the scope of my dreams.

Of all my youthful fantasies, the grandest was that of being a rock star. And I chased that dream. I grew to become a singer and a guitar player. I was the front man for a couple of bands and, believe it or not, got really close to finding success. Then, the ugly side of the industry bared its fangs and I walked away. In fact, I pretty much ran right back to small town, Ohio and settled into the life of a factory worker. I did well for myself, working my way up to management at a young age, but there was always a void. I was perpetually miserable as I tried to narrow my views and squeeze into a box that was far too small for who I had become. I didn’t fit into the mold of the American dream. A corner house with a white picket fence, a dog, a cat, a wife, and 2.5 kids was too conventional for me. The more I tried to be that person, the more unhappy I became.

Then I began writing. Not song lyrics this time, but stories. Suddenly, I had dreams again. I had aspirations and my love for life was renewed. I was bitten so hard by the writing bug that I was looking for every possible way to scratch the itch. While my creative soul set its heart on being a writer, the rest of me knew I had to return to a place I had fallen in love with. Colorado Springs, Colorado.

One day, I did just that. I dropped everything and decided to start anew in the shade of Pikes Peak. It didn’t take long to find out that my heart was a very efficient tour guide. I found myself joining a little writing group on Thursday nights. Through that group I discovered Pikes Peak Writers and made the best decision I’ve ever made; I got involved with the Pikes Peak Writers Conference. In April of 2016, I will attend my fourth conference. However, I won’t be there as just an attendee. I also have the incredible honor of being the Conference Director.

If you were to go back in time and visit that small town boy, he would tell you that he loved books, that he preferred to read over watching TV, and that (even at a young age) Edgar Allen Poe was his favorite author. However, he would not say that he dreamed of writing a novel, or directing a writer’s conference. Regardless, I am glad that my journey took me in this unexpected direction.

I wish I could answer why I was chosen as the Conference Director. I can say that Pikes Peak Writers Conference has a near twenty-five year tradition of being one of the best and friendliest writer’s conferences in the United States. That tradition was built by people who are passionate about writing, about preserving a place in this world for literature. They are a group dedicated to educating and encouraging writers of all backgrounds and abilities. At every conference, Pikes Peak Writers bringsin some of the best and most successful authors who have already found theirplaces on the bookshelves and introduces them to writers who are striving tojoin them. We do not discriminate, we do not judge. We offer something forevery palate. Each year Pikes Peak Writers looks for new ideas, new energy, andways to keep their conference fresh, current and engaging. Perhaps that’s why Iwas chosen this year. A new face who shares the passion that Pikes Peak Writershas displayed for so long.

I can’t predict my future as a writer. I would like to believe that there is a place on the bookshelves for a cover displaying my name. I want to think that, in the near future, I can completely erase the doubts of a small town boy with narrow horizons and live my dream. I want to find my place in this world as an author, as someone who believes in the beauty of words, of stories, of the imagination. I want to take a copy of my novel and personally deliver it to that small town library back home, thereby proving to everyone that, as long as you dare to dream it, it can happen. No matter your predispositions. That is my overall goal, the legacy I wish to leave in my absence. I want to inspire people to step out of their presumed, preassigned destinies and have the courage to follow their hearts.

As director for the 2016 Pikes Peak Writers Conference, I want to uphold the tradition of encouraging others to pursue their dreams, to let go of their inhibitions and put words onto paper. That is why Pikes Peak Writers feels like home for me. They are family. They don’t just get behind me, they walk with me and continuously tell me that I can. They provide the workshops that teach necessary skills, but that isn’t all. I learn about the life of a writer, about the ever-changing world of publishing, aboutthe inclusion and necessity of a social media presence, and so much more. But,the most important thing I have learned from my involvement with Pikes Peak Writers is that I am not alone. There are so many other amazing writers who are on this journey with me. No matter what stage of the adventure they are on, they turn around and look for me, grab my hand, and pull me forward. They lead me toward the realization of my dreams.

As Director,I would love for everyone to join me in April of 2016. However, no matter what you decide, I hope that you will understand the beauty and importance of what you are doing as a writer. It’s more than the money. It’s more than the notoriety. It’s even more than an ISPN number and a place on a bookstore shelf. Writing is about evolving. We have the ability to prove to children everywhere, including small town Ohio, that the world is much bigger than what they see when they open their eyes. As long as they open their minds, look to that horizon line and run toward the edge of the world, there are no limits to where they can go.

As long as we Dare To Dream, there is indeed hope.

Jason P. Henry
Conference Director
2016 Pikes Peak Writers Conference

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When he's not working with the dedicated and passionate people of Pikes Peak Writers, Jason P. Henry is lost in a world of serial killers, psychopaths, and other unsavory folks. Ask him what he is thinking, but only at your own risk. More often than not he is plotting a murder, considering the next victim, or twisting seemingly innocent things into dark and demented ideas. A Suspense, Thriller and Horror writer with a dark, twisted sense of humor, Jason strives to make people squirm, cringe, and laugh. He loves to offer a smile, but is quick to leave you wondering what lies behind it. Jason P. Henry is best summed up by the great philosopher Eminem “I'm friends with the monsters beside of my bed, get along with the voices inside of my head.” Learn more about Jason at www.jasonphenry.com.

My Dinner With Joseph Heller

It was the year Joseph Heller agreed to come and be the literary lion at the Trenton State College Writers’ Conference, sometime in the late eighties. The school is now called The College of New Jersey. Jean Hollander, director of the conference, contacted me at the last minute to come and run a workshop, because another writer had bailed. I was working at Applied Data Research at the time; I remember that because I still had an office and my office still had a door.

I took a personal day in the middle of the week to go to the conference. A free lunch for the writers running workshops was part of the deal. By the time my workshop was over there was only one other person in the writers’ free lunchroom, a gorgeous-looking woman with a profusion of dark curly hair and the sort of gypsy vibe to her clothes that we so admired in the eighties. I was dressed in tweeds, making believe I was enough of a professorial authority figure to run a workshop. As I hastily munched my free sandwich, this woman stretched her arms out in front of her, yawned elaborately, and said, “If I were home right now I would be taking a nap.”

A nap! Who the hell took naps in the eighties? I was working my butt off at the software factory, keeping house for a husband and small child, and rising every morning at 4:30 to get in a couple of hours of writing. “How do you get to take naps?” I said. “If I weren’t here, I’d be slaving at the office.”

She said, “I’ve never worked a day in my life.” Except for a writing class she taught at some college in Pennsylvania, she said, and for that she only had to show up once a week. Well, the scales fell from my eyes. This was what life was like for real writers. (I later discovered she was regularly published in the Atlantic Monthly.) For the rest of the day I hung out with this glorious woman, fascinated to see what real writers did.

The first thing she did was to bum a cigarette from two gay poets out in the hall, interrupting an intensely soulful discussion they were having about their work. She was trying to stop smoking, she said, and so hadn’t brought any cigarettes with her. The second thing she did was to peruse the conference program closely enough to spot the fact that the English department was taking Joseph Heller and maybe a couple of other writers out to dinner before his speech that evening. “We should go,” she said. “We’re writers.” She pulled me into Jean Hollander’s office and told her we wanted to go to the dinner. Other people were there, so Ms. Hollander was unable to give us the brush-off gracefully, although she probably wanted to.

Anyway, we were in. When we got to the restaurant, one of those dark places on the outskirts of Trenton where the food is divinely Italian and one’s fellow diners might be mobsters, my new friend grabbed us seats directly across from Joseph Heller. The faculty of the English department, some of them hard of hearing, were forced to sit at the ends of the long, narrow table while we writers kept up a witty conversation in the middle. “You should write humor, Kate,” Joseph Heller said at one point. We said I did. He told us stories of the joys of being a famous writer, how his publisher had bought him two servings of oysters at a restaurant in London when he was touring, how he had gone out to the market next day and had seen what they cost, how he had gloated.

When dinner was over the faculty members streamed out into the rainy parking lot to go get the car. My gypsy friend and I began to follow them, but at the door, Joseph Heller put his arms around both of our shoulders. “Wait,” he said. “We are the famous writers. Wait here and they will bring the car to us.”

We waited, and they came. Next day, back at the software house, I put up a little hand-lettered sign on my office door: “Kiss my ass. I’m a famous writer."

© 2014 Kate Gallison

Cons

Over the course of my checkered writing career I have attended a number of conventions and conferences, with varying degrees of success. The nicest things that happened at these gatherings were encounters with writers and editors who later became my friends, or who were my friends already. The most disagreeable things were snubs by people who weren't my friends (and never will be, if I can remember their names and faces), and also occasions when I screwed up so badly that I was like to die of embarrassment.


But all that is personal. I'm not going to talk about it. I came here today to talk about the uses of convention- and conference-going to advance one's career.

My agent used to give me advice about that. I arrived late at my first Bouchercon convention in Philadelphia, years and years ago, failed to tell anybody I was a published writer, and wandered around from panel to panel listening to people talk, profoundly impressed to find myself in such exalted company. My agent told me later that this was wrong. I was supposed to make an impression on people, myself, she said.

The writer who made the deepest impression on me that weekend was Walter Moseley, who was still relatively unknown, at least by me. Some woman in the audience asked him a completely silly, fundamentally racist question at the end of his panel and I saw him straighten his face and give her a civil answer. I loved the way he straightened his face. It only took a microsecond. This is what you do. You keep yourself under complete control, never letting on what a pain in the ass it is to suffer fools.

As years went by I learned to put myself forward more at these confabs, making a fool of my own self from time to time, appearing on panels, even moderating them when the organizers discovered I was willing. I wasn't bad at that, actually. One time I moderated a panel with Grace Edwards and I-forget-who on it, terrific panelists all. We met for breakfast beforehand to hash over the topic. At breakfast we were wildly entertaining. By the time we got to the panel the fizz was gone. The lesson I took from that was not to overprepare, merely to make sure that every panelist got a chance to shine.

So that became my style of moderating, read everybody's work, put some questions together to showcase each panelist, meet shortly beforehand to get comfortable with each other, and let 'er rip. Usually this worked fine.

It's hard for me to remember that not everyone is as easy as I am, or as hammy, in front of an audience. Once there was a panelist, an excellent writer, a successful writer still today, maybe even a nice guy under ordinary circumstances, who was so put off by what he thought was my casual attitude that he panicked. He convinced himself that if I were left in charge of this panel I would somehow torpedo his career. As if one bad panel could even do that. He must have had terrible stage fright. So he decided to run the panel himself.

First he switched the name signs to put himself at my left elbow. Then he stuck a list of his own questions in front of me, on top of my own set of questions. Then, as I endeavored to find my own rhythm for moving the panel along, he kept interrupting, poking at his questions with a trembling finger. It was kind of an ordeal.

But at least there were people watching us. Later there was the Bouchercon in some midwestern city where I met Donna Murray, lovely woman, excellent writer. They signed us up to read for half an hour in a room right across the hall from a panel with Parnell Hall, Joan Hess and some other entertaining folks. Not a single soul came to hear us read. The two of us sat on the dais chatting in front of an empty room as gales of merry laughter rolled across the hall from the fun panel.

As a result I said, "Ha!" when the organizers of a Bouchercon in Toronto offered me fifteen minutes to do whatever I liked. "Ha! I would have to tap dance and set my hair on fire to get any attention." Then I thought, "Why in hell not? I'll promise to do that, and maybe I'll get some attention."

I won't go into the logistical problems this presented, or the long weeks of practicing my tap dance. Suffice it to say that I came to the little room ten minutes early. There I found fifteen women watching the handsome Barry Eisler read from a work in progress, in which his protagonist took off all his clothes and ran through the countryside outside of Los Angeles, for recreational purposes, I think it was. The piece was extremely well written, very descriptive. I was impressed. So were the women. In fact after he yielded the stage to me they remained sitting where they were, stupefied by visions of Barry Eisler running around the chaparral buck naked, while I tap danced and set my hair on fire. One hair. I plucked it out and set it on fire. I have no idea whether any of them bought my books.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

Tribal Rites of Passage…

Writing is often solitary. Sometimes you feel you're a secluded hermit. But at other times your membership in this society dictates that you join the other tribesmen in one of the various group rites of passage.

You get out of your holy sanctuary and take a bus-train-car-plane to stand in a sacred circle and chat with dozens-hundreds-thousands of your fellow tribe-scribes in a meeting-party-conference or world convocation.

You drink in the wine of talent and success. You absorb, soak up, imbibe all the wonders of this world that can't be really shared in solitude.

You indulge in handshakes, hugs, laughs, smiles, frowns - tons of human emotions rush into your whole being. You're thrilled to rub shoulders with the great gods of Crime Literature! You blossom with pride to see how much you fit into the rituals of your tribe. Their folkways become your laws.

You say a silent prayer—"It is good to be here!"

Within minutes after you walk in the sacred portals, you exchange brain waves with the lofty, the eminent, the exalted ones of the tribe.

Once there were only a couple of these powwows. In 2013-14 they are ubiquitous and omni-present. City after city, state after state, you can even go to distant lands to join the tribe!

You can link brains with everyone from the bestselling darlings of the literary world to the unknown newborns who have ventured into the tribal haunts for the first time.

As a member of the Mystery Tribe you can choose your poison:

• murder methods
• love and sex
• 10 commandments of mysteries
• perfect villains
• taboos, telling lies and thrills

to name a few...

Of course the world's leading Tribal Convention is called The Bouchercon, held yearly since 1970. Named for that noted tribesman, author/editor/reviewer , Anthony Boucher, it is known universally as " A convention of creators and devotees of mystery and detective fiction." This year , Albany, New York, becomes the tribal Mecca.

Whether you are a senior tribesperson or a neophyte, tell us your feelings and reactions to these tribal gatherings. Which one, where and why! And even suggestions for future conventions.

We'd love to have you share your thoughts, opinions and experiences with us at Crime Writer's Chronicle! Click on comments and enlighten us!

Thelma Jacqueline Straw

Right Now, Write Now

A few weeks ago, I attended Malice Domestic, the traditional-mystery writer/fan convention held every year in Bethesda, Maryland. After a panel, I was chatting with a woman who was working on her first mystery, and I happened to mention that I have another (full time) career.  She asked me, “How do you find time to write?” Okay, as a writer, I know what subtext is. I knew she really meant, “How can I find time to write?” So I asked her how much time she was able to spend now? And for ten minutes, she laid out all the reasons she just couldn’t find time. Her job, her commute, her family and social commitments; the homework, housework, husband. Not enough hours in the day. I didn’t get to say much. I nodded. My chin(s) got quite a workout nodding.

It’s not the first time I’ve been asked about finding time, but as I listened that morning, I realized how often I hear lists of “Why I can’t”. I began to get a little frustrated.

It’s not that I don’t sympathize. I do. I spent a couple of decades not finding time. And there’s an “if only” lesson there I wouldn’t wish on anyone else.

So, let me get to the point: Novels are written by, well, writing. And then rewriting. And rewriting. And throwing out everything you wrote the day before and starting over. Fixing the gaping hole in your plot. Crafting a better villain. A better story. New writers often believe there’s some magic out there. That they will wake up one morning not only with time, but also with sudden inspiration whereby the book will just flow from the fingertips into the computer.

There is no magic. Repeat, please. And again.

From the Shoe cartoon strip (1977-2000). Visit jeff-macnelly.com

If you’re a new writer who hasn't found time to finish (or start) that book, here's the best advice I have: Right Now, Write Now. Don’t wait till next month, when you’ve settled into your new job. Or next fall, when the kids start school. Or next year when your spouse will get that promotion and you can work part-time. Or when you win the lottery.

You need a routine. You need a commitment. Or you’ll look up a decade from now, and that book won’t be any further along than it is today. So start today.

Create an honest chart of how you spend your time on weekdays and weekends. Remember, it’s like the first rough draft of your novel. Nobody has to see it. There will no judgment but yours.

Are you spending an hour in the evening online, catching up with friends/family or checking out YouTube? Or watching TV? Are you sleeping in an extra hour on the weekends to make up for your long work week? Find what you can change right now. Even if you find only one hour on Saturday mornings and two on Sunday nights, it’s three hours more than you have now. 

Use it. Routine is very important. If you have no ideas ready when your new writing time comes along, hie thee to the computer anyway. Sit down, open the file and just write. A snatch of dialog, a description of a location. Random thoughts on the page might lead to other ideas. They will at least get the juices flowing. And don't leave till your time's up.

You’ll get into the habit of writing, and the habit of not doing something else. And then as you make progress, you'll want and find even more time to write — you won’t volunteer for yet another committee (you’ll learn to say, “Sorry, I just can't do it this time”); you’ll invite friends over twice a month, not every week; the FB page won't get updated for days; you'll revise chapters in hard copy during lunch; you’ll make character notes waiting in line at the grocery store; you’ll take a recorder with you on the treadmill, although “He said (thud, thud, pant, thud, thud, pant), put the gun down (thud, thud, pant, pant, wheeze, gasp)” can be hard to transcribe later. Using a recorder during my exercise walks around my neighborhood has been invaluable in working out dialog, and in showing me how out of shape I am.

Whatever time you can find, find it. But find it now. And eventually you’ll finish the book. It might take three years. Or five. But you'll finish it.

And your new routine will serve you well when you finally sell that first book and the publisher wants the next one in 8 months!

Sheila York

Overheard at a Writer’s Conference

Definition of a writer: “A shrinking violet wrapped around an egomaniac.”

“How long does it take you to finish a novel?”
“As Paul Valery said, ‘A novel is never finished, it is simply abandoned.'”

“How did she ever get published?”

“My books are always hidden behind somebody else’s!”

Successful author: “I hate giving talks and being on panels.”
Unpublished writer: “Oh, come on, you know you love it.”

“Are you coming to the next conference?”
“Over my dead body!”

Robin Hathaway