Guest Blogger Rosemary Harris

We are so happy to have Rosemary Harris as our guest blogger today.

Rosemary was born in Brooklyn, New York, and now splits her time between Manhattan’s East Side and Fairfield County, Connecticut. After several careers in book retailing (Waldenbooks), direct marketing (Crown Publishers, American Express), and television (Disney/ABC Video, WNET, New York’s public television station), she traded in her pumps for a pair of plastic garden clogs to indulge in her favorite pastime.

During one long snowy winter when she couldn't be in her garden, a small item in the New York Times about a mummified body piqued her interest. Subsequent research led her to a new passion - writing - and her research led to her first book, Pushing Up Daisies.

When she’s not writing or gardening, she tries to find time for kayaking and hiking; at last count she’s visited over 70 national parks, monuments, and recreation areas, but her favorites are Yosemite and Canyonlands.

Here is Rosemary's take on having a room of one's own - wherever one happens to be. At the moment, her "office" is in a glamorous spot far away from the snow:

I have a pretty nice office. ["Editor's" note: See the fantastic photo here under "Rosemary Off Duty": http://www.rosemaryharris.com/photoalbum.htm] I was a marketing consultant before I started writing mysteries so I was used to business machines and army issue file cabinets cluttering up my home before most of my writing friends. Now that I am “officially” a writer – whatever that means - I appropriated more space in my house so that I could have a quiet, peaceful setting in which to write. An inspirational setting, if you will. (Plant tongue firmly in cheek here.) That inspirational setting is now filled with a telescope, a vintage linen collection, bird and garden prints, funky lamps from the forties and fifties and stacks of mysteries purchased at the various bookstores, libraries and conventions I’ve attended. Is it any wonder my fabulous office is sometimes a little distracting?

Most of the writers I know are on a hamster-like one book a year treadmill. We write, we promote, we write. Occasionally we fritter away our time on non-essentials like friends, family, social and community obligations. Finding the time and an inspirational place to write can be challenging.

Last week, I was kayaking and camping in the Virgin Islands. I wrote in a tent on Peter Island and a shack on Jost van Dyke. In the past I’ve written in a mud hut in central Tanzania (where my husband and I were building a library) and a tented cabin in Yosemite Valley.

It may help that my preferred method of writing is longhand, with a pencil on a yellow legal pad. That’s what I’m doing now actually...my flight’s been cancelled and I’m still on an island…it’s just not Manhattan. All around me people are drinking pina coladas and painkillers, reading The Help and perhaps wondering who the crazy lady with the pencil sharpener is. No. They’re probably not. Maybe one day one of them will read one of my books – my money is on the Joanne Fluke fan not the person reading the 800-page biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, but you never know. The idea of someone working on a beautiful beach like this is probably as foreign to them as…well, that chain-smoking guy in the too-small Speedo is to me.

But it is what we do. I’ve met hundreds of mystery writers in the past two years since my debut novel, Pushing Up Daisies, was released. Whether it’s the possibility of that first contract, the excitement of a new series or the potential of a breakout book, we are the hardest working group of people I’ve ever encountered. And I’ve worked in television, video and book publishing. It’s one of the things that we all have in common – other than loving Lee Child and Carolyn Hart and perhaps wanting to win an Edgar.

So whether you’re working on the umpteenth draft of your query letter or the twelfth revision of your third book, we’re all in the same boat. Right now mine’s a fiberglass kayak.

Cheers,

Rosemary Harris

http://www.rosemaryharris.com/

Rosemary's latest release is The Big Dirt Nap (pb) much of which was written at Ivan’s Stress-Free Bar and Campground on Jost van Dyke (pictured above).

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? (And Does It Matter?)

"Where do you get your ideas?"

I mean, really, is there any other question so ubiquitous in the life of an author?

That said, it’s also a GREAT question because I know as a reader I often find myself looking up from the page and thinking, “I wonder how the author came up with this?”

After all, since the birth of the Internet we all have access to scads and scads of information. So how can it be that two people might look at the same occurrence or the same news article or the same commentary and then disappear into their offices to write two entirely different books? How can it be that Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse (once called her “Southern Vampire” series) be incredibly different from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight? Which is different from Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat? Which is different from Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Which is different from Rosemary Laurey’s Kiss Me Deadly?

Truth to tell, there’s nothing new under the sun. Or, ahem, under the full moon either.

Today I found an old handout from Lou Heckler, one of my favorite speakers. Check him out at http://www.louheckler.com/ It would be difficult to find a more thoughtful, entertaining and erudite platform professional. If you ever get the chance to see him, by all means do. (While you listen, pay careful attention to the structure of his talk. He’s very canny about the order he uses to present and emphasize information. Really, each time he speaks, it’s a master class in the art of giving an effective presentation.) In this particular handout, Lou discussed how “theme” is not the same as “slant.” You see, all those books I mentioned above have vampires as their theme. Each book, however, has a different slant.

Charlaine Harris’s work raises questions about xenophobia, what it means to be human, and whether our prejudices might stem, in part, from our religious beliefs.

Stephenie Meyer’s work takes the form of a romance novel with its extended riff on unfulfilled sexual promise, but she is writing about the trauma of being an awkward teenager.

Anne Rice’s work had a decidedly gothic theme and a religious viewpoint. Their setting—New Orleans—was as vibrant as any character.

Bram Stoker’s work wasn’t the first mention of vampires in literature, but it was probably the great granddaddy of most of what we think about the undead, blood-suckers. Written in epistolary form (diary and newspaper articles provide much of the information), it sprang from the legend of “Vlad the Impaler.” The novel is supposedly a riff on the clash between the new world and the old.

Rosemary Laurey’s work is incredibly romantic and yet very modern. It follows many of the ideals of popular romance novels, but adds in the sort of questions that are part of our zeitgeist.
As I write this, I think of the classes I’ve taught about getting published. Many times students will tell me they fear having their ideas stolen. That’s reasonable. That can happen. But most ideas for books are fungible. It’s the slant, the plotting, and the author’s voice, that make a book unique—and therefore, salable.