I Spy

by G.M. Malliet

As I write this blog, we are into the second week of the General Petraeus situation.

Where I live, this story—or non-story, depending on your point of view—has taken on a life of its own. I live close enough to the White House that with a carefully-aimed rock, I probably could break a window in the West Wing.* I’ve been aware for some time that our physical location makes us obsess over things that the rest of the world, particularly the French, would completely ignore.

No one in D.C. can talk about anything but who knew what when, what it all means for national security, and how soon the trend of men sending shirtless photos of themselves via email is going to end. Much of my family’s Thanksgiving Day conversation was taken up not with thoughts of gratitude but with speculation about Petraeus’ entanglement. Was it no more than the usual and expected human folly (nephew Matthew), a sign of the moral rot that set into this dag-nabbed country when Roosevelt left office (great-uncle Reggie), or a total frame-up job by an unnamed foreign power (neice Betsy). Betsy’s theory was, I thought, highly original. Hey, I’m supposed to be the mystery writer, the thinker-upper of bizarre plots. Here was the Mata Hari story of the century and I completely missed it.

I thought it might be time to conduct a little poll to see how closely people outside the D.C. beltway have been paying attention as the revelations pile up. (As one online commenter noted, “I am running out of popcorn.”) Please circle your answers below using a number two pencil. There are no wrong answers, only wrong people, or whatever it was my civics teacher used to say:

1.      I have now learned all I care to know about General Petraeus, including how to spell Petraeus.

2.      I don’t understand how Robert Barnett, the big-name, $900-per-hour D.C. lawyer and literary agent, can help Petraeus or anyone “navigate their return to private life” without using up that person’s entire pension fund. I think I can help you return to private life for a lot less money than Bob would charge. For example, you could simply change your voicemail message and leave your key with the receptionist. Oh, and you might want to think about opening a new personal email account.

3.      I want to become an "honorary ambassador" like Jill Kelley and get diplomatic plates for my car. Do I have to move to Tampa or can I do that from here?

4.      One of the more fascinating things we’ve learned in recent days is how many perks go with being a general. I think everyone should have their own motorcade of twenty-eight motorcycles to escort them to parties. That would probably be way better than being driven by a psychotic D.C. cabdriver with a suspended license who speeds through red lights, narrowly missing pedestrians, which is how I currently get to parties.

5.      I think belly fat like Mata Hari’s should come back into style, and soon. Thanksgiving was all that.

This poll is by no means complete. By the time this blog goes to print, the press will have come up with many more astonishing revelations than I could ever imagine. Writing fiction is so much easier.

Happy Post-Thanksgiving, everyone. I hope your team won.

*If anyone from the FBI is reading this blog, please be aware that this comment was A JOKE. I have no intention of throwing anything, anywhere. Please do not search my email because the problem, you see, is that I am a crime writer and you simply would not believe what you can find in my Gmail account. There are earnest discussions about administering and detecting poisons, and Dexter-like analyses of blood spatter patterns, and speculation about how short you would have to be to easily be folded inside a steamer trunk. I am inured to this now but I can see how anyone idly trolling through my online research folder might be alarmed. An editor who recently was researching the premise of a short story I’d written said, “My internet history might now look a little scary to anyone searching my computer.” I hear you. One thing that spurred me on to become a published author was the thought that I really needed to justify some of the creepy stuff saved in my browser history, not to mention some of my tax-deductible expenses.**

**If anyone from the IRS is reading this blog, let me just ask you when is the last time you traveled to St. Louis for a writers’ conference? Because that is one very expensive city, let me tell you. The $75 filet was just the tip of the iceberg. I left off of my return a ton of expenses I thought you might find questionable, like the camel rental. Don’t ask.

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G.M. Malliet is the author of the DCI St. Just mysteries, from Midnight Ink, and the Father Max Tudor mysteries, from Minotaur/Thomas Dunne. Please visit her at her website: http://GMMalliet.com, find her on Facebook, or follow her on Twitter.

Black cats, knocking wood, and WIPs

We got attacked by two—count ‘em: two— nasty little hackers two weeks ago. My time on the computer time was limited to trying various fixes and cleans recommended by geek co-workers. Fortunately, I married a geek (WIN) and after he consulted with uber-geeks who speak a language I’m not privy to, our computers are back to their healthy selves.

One positive outcome of this odyssey through hacker hell was lots of old-fashioned longhand writing. I’m a fountain pen addict—I own one for each book I’ve written plus a couple more I couldn’t resist. I start each new book with a new pen. I prefer to think of it as ritual rather than superstition. Hey, it’s my quirk, so I get to name it.

Another positive was more indulgence in manga. When I’m writing a mystery, I can’t read one. Writing is fun but it’s also hard work, so manga is my relaxation of choice. I love the angst, the scenery-chewing, the purple prose. All the things I don’t indulge in when I write. Nowhere else can I find demons with a sense of humor or vampires who preen like beauty pageant contestants.

It’s also a learning experience—sometimes I don’t get the humor. Sometimes I do, but the timing of the joke seems off. And often I learn cultural tidbits that I squirrel away for possible character creation in future books. (Yes, that is the cover of Noah Lukeman’s invaluable The First Five Pages on the far left. It’s one of my essentials.)

So, fellow writers, what’s your new WIP ritual? Pens? A new playlist? (Adam Hurst’s amazing cello music is the soundtrack for the current book.) And as long as I’m being nosy, do you read the genre of the book you’re writing, or do you do a one-eighty like me? I love seeing how everyone else does the process.

Do you have geek genes or Levi jeans?

By Joe Moore

I consider myself to be tech savvy—maybe more so than the average PC user. I believe I have geek genes. My wife has Levi jeans. She is always calling me into her office to say that there's something wrong with her PC and could I fix it. It’s usually a result of pilot error.

I wasn’t born with a geek gene. I believe I got it while in close proximity to someone who was born with it: my son. I remember when he passed it on to me. Many years ago, he came home from school one day with a Radio Shack TRS-80. He had traded a friend an old CB radio for it. The TRS used a TV for a monitor and had a paltry 16k of RAM. No hard drive. Storage was on an external 5.25” floppy disk or an audio cassette tape. Within a week, I got my hands on a basic word processing module and was using the computer more than my son. I wrote lots of stories with it as I dreamed of becoming a novelist.

Being an official geek, I soon grew tired of the TRS-80 and moved up to the highly advanced Commodore 64. Same external storage but a whopping 64k of RAM. Now we were getting somewhere. I found a better word processor program and kept writing more stuff. My first novel was years away, but I was on a roll.

Somewhere along the line, I learned how to use an Apple Macintosh. Built-in floppy storage and a massive 128k of RAM. I could feel the power.

Then I purchased a dedicated word processing device made by Magnavox called a VideoWriter. It was a computer, printer and monitor built into one unit. I wrote my first book using it--an action adventure novel set in Cuba and South Florida called DIRE STRAITS.

My first real, bigboy computer was a 286 made by Emerson. It had 4MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. Today, you can find toys in a McDonalds Happy Meal with more memory than my Emerson.

Next came a Micron which I used for many years until settling into my trusty Dell running three 19” LCD monitors and a bagillion giggawatts of flux capacitors and hot-swapping Terradactyl bites of quadrophonic, plutonium multiplex demodulators. When I turn it on, it’s like the scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation where the whole power grid dims.

Does having geek genes help me write better novels? Probably not. But when you're a geek, it doesn't really matter. All that does matter is staying on the "bleeding edge" of technology.

So whatever happed to my son who gave me the geek gene? He went on to become a federal agent for the Department of Defense. His specialty: computer forensics.

Which do you have: geek genes or Levi jeans? What was your journey like along the techno highway to get you to your current computer? And the biggest question of all: will you stay with Windows XP or upgrade to Vista? I'm running the Vista compatibility test right now.