Lev Raphael

“Am I In Your Book?”

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I once heard a rumor that someone thought they were “in” one of my mystery novels and was really pissed off.  Well, it was a bizarre situation because this person wasn’t remotely in my book, not even near my book.

On the other hand, a fan once jokingly said, “You should put me in one of your mysteries” and I walked away smiling.  Because this fan–a lifetime academic–had apparently read them all without realizing I’d used a dramatic incident from the fan’s life as a plot point in one of the books.  So you could say that fan made a phantom guest appearance.  Sort of.  Or a contribution?

The thing is, nobody gets shoved into my books from real life.  Ever.  And each one of my characters is a composite of fact and fiction.  Sometimes more of one, sometimes more of another.

Take Juno Dromgoole in my Nick Hoffman mystery series.  She’s a luscious professor of Canadian Studies who’s beautiful, foul-mouthed, and intemperate.  By making her over-the-top, I was playing with the American image of Canadians as quiet and well-mannered.  How was she born? She was actually inspired by several different women I met at a mystery conference.  But the more I worked on her, the more she became sculpted by the storyline and interactions with other characters and the further away she grew from her “sources.”  I don’t even remember anymore who those women were exactly, but I did finally imagine her as having the glamor of Tina Turner at her best.

Curiously, I did once run into a woman who looked and dressed just as I envisioned Juno did, when I was staying in a German hotel on a book tour–and she was Italian.

The smallest thing can inspire me: a look, a gesture, an outfit, a snarky line, an accent–and suddenly a grain of sand is on its way to becoming a pearl.  So people do make their way into my fiction, but always through shards, fragments, bits and pieces.

Even if I had wanted to put that angry person mentioned above in my book, I wouldn’t really have been able to.  For me, people are just models and sometimes inspiration.  Fiction sculpts them into something completely different from what they were until they become unrecognizable. If it’s good, of course.

Lev Raphael is the author of The Edith Wharton Murders and 24 others books in many genres which you can find on Amazon.

Abs, Death, and Femjep

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Characters in thrillers–especially the women–live in a parallel universe, don’t they? A universe where they’ve never read a thriller or seen one on TV or in a movie theater. Because otherwise they wouldn’t behave like idiots even now, heading past the middle of the decade.

Take Jennifer Lopez in this year’s erotic thriller The Boy Next Door.

She plays a high school teacher of classics–that’s right, and in a school that offers a year-long course in Homer. The poet, not Homer Simpson. It’s one helluva well-paid job because she drives what looks like a Cadillac SUV.

lopez my blogOf course, who cares since you’re either ogling Lopez looking gorgeous in every scene or drooling over ripped Ryan Guzman, the sociopath who moves in next door, befriends her nebbish son, displays his body for Lopez at night in a well-lit bedroom across the way, seduces her and then stalks her in escalating scenes of nightmarish threat and violence.

ryan-guzman-step-up_0It all ends with bizarre family togetherness, but before that, Lopez goes dumb in major ways aside from having humped a high school sociopath. Her bestie phones Lopez to come over right away because she’s in trouble. When Lopez pulls up and the house is totally dark, is she cautious? Nope. Does she call first? No again. She rushes inside. When the lights don’t work, does she back out and dial 911? Well, you guessed it. She proceeds alone and unarmed into the large dark house, calling out her friend’s name.

And in her final confrontation with the psycho hunk, when she gets a chance to take him down, she clunks him on the head just once. Duh! When he’s knocked out, she doesn’t finish the job or even kick him a few times to further incapacitate him, despite knowing how dangerous and twisted he is. He’s tied up her husband and son, threatened to kill them both, killed her best friend, and was going to turn the barn they’re all in into a giant funeral pyre. So of course she turns her back on him.

And of course that one blow doesn’t do the trick. He predictably rises up and attacks her again. More mayhem ensues…and Lopez shrieks enough to win a Yoko Ono Award.

You’d think after Scream had eviscerated this kind of plotting years ago (pun intended), writers would be embarrassed to have their characters behave like dummies, but Hollywood keeps churning out femjep films. Sadly, this one was co-produced by Lopez herself.

Lev Raphael is the author of The Edith Wharton Murders and 24 other books in many genres which you can find on Amazon.

5 Things *Not* To Do At Your Book Reading

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I’m just back from reading from my memoir/travelogue My Germany in Windsor, Ontario.  I was at a fundraising event for BookFest Windsor and people asking me to sign books afterwards said they enjoyed it especially because most authors read from their books so badly.

I tend to avoid author readings myself because I’ve seen too many authors make basic, embarrassing mistakes.

Here are five things to avoid if you’re going to read from your book, whatever the genre:

–Don’t apologize in any way.  You may feel nervous, but you’re a performer and you have an audience.  You need to exemplify sprezzatura: the art that conceals all art.  Your reading should be smooth and practiced and not feel like you’re trying too hard.  The seams should never show.

–Don’t  read anything you can’t emotionally control.  If a part of your book might make you cry for any reason or even get misty-eyed, avoid it.  A reading isn’t a psychodrama.  And don’t announce that something often leaves you teary and go ahead anyway.  That can make an audience cringe.

–Don’t keep your eyes on your book.  This may sound impossible, but it’s not.  You need to study and rehearse your reading enough times so that you’re familiar with it–almost as if you were an actor.  Then you can maintain good, consistent eye contact with your audience.  If all you do is look down, you’ll be dull.

–Don’t get over-specific about how you and when you write, or how you wrote that book before your reading.  People do like detail and do like to get to know the person behind the book, but they don’t need TMI.  The book is the centerpiece, not the really gross flu you had when you were researching it.

–Don’t hog the stage if you’re on the bill with other authors.  Time your reading more than once at home, and then trim it.  If the organizer gives you twenty minutes, go for fifteen.  In situations with multiple readers, less is usually more because someone else is likely to run over.

Remember, the event isn’t all about you: it’s about your audience first and foremost.  Think about them, plan for them, respect them, connect with them.  They deserve your best, whether five people come to hear you, or five hundred.

interested audienceLev Raphael has done hundreds of readings on three continents, in more than one language.  He is the author of  Writer’s Block is Bunk (Guide to the Writing Life) and 24 other books in genres from memoir to mystery.

When Motives Miss by a Mile

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I started reading crime fiction in high school: Agatha Christie, the Swedish writing team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, John Creasey, and the comic work of Phoebe Atwood Taylor.  I wasn’t great at solving puzzles, but I was always fascinated by what would actually drive someone to murder.

phoebe atwood taylor

That fascination took a different turn when I started reviewing crime fiction for The Detroit Free Press in the 1990s and continued to do so for about a decade.  Motive now wasn’t just something to study, it had to to be convincing, it had to fit perfectly into the entire clever construction of plot–or the carefully-built edifice buckled and sometimes even collapsed.  Reading crime novels where the motive for murder or mayhem was weak made me determined to ensure that my own mysteries never fell short that way.

And because I watch a lot of crime drama on TV and crime movies, I’m often thrown when a motive just doesn’t seem believable.  Case in point.  In a recent episode of Forever, whose sleuth is a medical examiner, a ballerina’s foot was found at a theater.  She was initially presumed dead until it was forensically determined that the foot had been surgically removed so as not to kill her.  Weird, right?  The suspects narrowed down quickly to her ex-surgeon brother and all the evidence was discovered in his home.

But why?  Jealousy?  That didn’t add up.  They’d escaped Cuba together so she could have a great career and she on the point of stardom, about to be dubbed a prima ballerina (the show actually got this wrong, mistaking a prima ballerina assoluta for a prima ballerina)

There’s a good chance in crime fiction that the “least likely” suspect is the one who did it, and when she was was found alive, I couldn’t imagine why she would have had her brother do it.  But she did, and here’s the bogus motive the writers came up with: 1) she had a degenerative bone disease and 2) she had only a year to dance and so 3) she wanted to go out in glory and be remembered forever that way.

I’ve known dancers and I thought this was ludicrous.  What dancer would consent to having her foot cut off even if she wouldn’t be able to dance again?  What person would consent to such horrible mutilation and be left crippled for the rest of her life?  Nothing about the character made her seem unhinged enough to do something so radical.

Sometimes crime writers of all kinds try so hard to be original or surprising that they end up just coming off as ridiculous.  This was one of those times.  She was still able to dance and she could have danced with the title and then retired for whatever reason and remained legendary.  Now she’s a legend in a freakish way (and is missing a foot!).  Why would any dancer want to be remembered like that?

Lev Raphael’s 25th book is the Michigan bestseller Assault With a Deadly Lie.  You can read about his other mysteries at his web site.

Word Count Tyranny

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You’ve all seen it before on Facebook: the jaunty post from a writer of some kind who says, “Guess what, dudes?  Today I wrote 7500 words!  How did y’all do?”

There’ll be a chorus of praise: “Wow!”  “I’m impressed! “Awesome!”  “You rock!”

And a few people will admit to feeling inferior: “I only wrote 500.”  Only?  Why is that something to apologize for?  What’s wrong with that?  It’s only “inferior” when compared to 7500 words, which is suddenly the new Gold Standard for daily production.  Why should anyone apologize for writing any amount?

You can be sure that there are other people who won’t post at all in response to the Word Count Wiz because they feel really embarrassed.  Maybe they weren’t able to eke out much of anything that day, and a total of 7500 words feels like mockery.  But they shouldn’t be embarrassed or put off.

Crowing about how many words you’ve written may feel super in the moment (and Facebook is often about moments), but think about it.  A post like that could have the unintentional effect of shaming people who are blocked, or write slowly, or who don’t write every day.  These might be writers who’re just starting out, or who’ve suffered traumatic rejections of their work, or were dropped by their publishers, or who for any number of reasons just don’t produce a lot, or write fast–or both.

But even if if doesn’t, and even if you did write those 7500 words in a day, so what?

Who says writing fast and copiously is a guarantee of anything?  Those 7500 words could be 100% crap.  Writing that much and that quickly only proves you can type fast, nothing more. Remember Cold Mountain?  Its National Book Award?  The millions of copies sold?  The movie?

slow writerWhy is the on-line writing world so obsessed with churning out words every single day, day after day–and tons of them? Why should it matter unless you have a contract and you’re under deadline? Why should you measure yourself as a writer by the number of words you write per day?  And seriously, why should other writers care?

What about revision?  Experienced authors know how important revision is to a finished work.  But revision isn’t necessarily about how much you get done–it”s more about what you get done, how you re-shape your project, whatever it is.  A major revision could ultimately involve very few words but make a huge difference.

Why don’t people post more about that or about the work itself? Whatever happened to caring about substance?  Like honing dialogue in a scene?  Deepening a character’s motivation?  Or building the arc of your narrative?  What happened to caring about anything other than how many words you spew out in a day–and then posting the total in some kind of victory lap?

scowell-smug-ross-kingsland-how-to-deal-with-hatersLev Raphael is the author of Assault With a Deadly Lie, a novel about militarized police.  You can find it and his other books on Amazon.

Don’t Spread Bogus Quotations!

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Someone on Twitter recently pointed me to a book called How To Gain 100,000 Twitter Followers: Twitter Secrets Revealed by An Expert.

Well, who wouldn’t want a vast horde of followers? I know that gave Jesus  some trouble, but on Twitter you just have to feed them content, with no miracles involved, right?

So I sampled the book on Amazon and here’s what I found right at the beginning, obviously meant as inspiration: “Learn the rules like a pro, so that you can break them like an artist.” It was attributed to Picasso. The dial on my bullshit meter went into the red zone and the meter melted down.

946848-pablo-picassoWhether he supposedly said it in Spanish, French, or English, I just couldn’t imagine Picasso using the word “pro.” And the whole quotation just sounded too flashy, informal, and fake–why would a renowned artist put it like that?  It reeked of being a t-shirt slogan, not something one of the world’s great painters would say.

So I did some checking and quickly discovered that despite the quotation being attributed to Picasso across the Internet (and probably across the universe), there’s no citation whatsoever proving that he did.

It’s distant origin might possibly be Life’s Little Instruction Book which has a similar line: “Learn the rules then break some.” Add the bit about the artist and Boom, you’re viral!

But Picasso isn’t the only one who gets credit for the line. A different version was attributed to the Dalai Lama, too, if you can believe it.

Well, even if you can’t believe it, plenty of people have. Snopes has disproved the Dalai Lama attribution, tracing it to a viral email chain.  Oh, and there are also versions attributed to comedian Lea DeLaria and that prolific dude Unknown, who I guess is a cousin of Anon.

So did I read further in the sample on Amazon to learn some fabulous Twitter secrets that would change my life? No.  Because I figured if the author was sloppy in his epigraph, why should I trust him with my $9.95–who knows what else he got wrong?

jon-stewart-huhLev Raphael is the author of 25 books in genres from memoir to mystery which you can find on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  Picasso had nothing to do with any of them.

Blog Censorship

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I’m constantly finding blogs and even comments on blogs where people will use asterisks in this way: s**t or even sh*t.

You’ve seen it plenty of times, I’m sure–and it extends to other four-letter words, too. They’re partly printed, but letters are left out and replaced with one or more asterisks.

Is there anyone in the world who looks at those words and wonders what they mean? No. They read them for what the original speaker or writer actually meant.

So why cover up the reality? Who are we hiding from?

When you leave some letters out and fill them in with asterisks you’re not hiding anything. You’re just making your readers fill in the blanks and pronounce those words in their heads. Isn’t there something prudishly weird and hypocritical about that? Aren’t you in fact emphasizing those words, calling more attention to them, rather than the reverse?

Instead of using a few asterisks, why not eliminate the word entirely? Substitute asterisks or a blank line and make the reader guess what you wanted to write.

Which would create a carnival of profanity.

So that wouldn’t work either, would it?

Oh **** !

Head-smack

Lev Raphael is the author of the comic Nick Hoffman mystery series which you can find at Amazon along with his other books in genres from memoir to vampire fiction.

The Editor Who Worked My Last Nerve

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I’ve been fortunate in my career to have terrific editors for stories or essays appearing in magazines and anthologies.  The same goes for all my books, whether the presses were large or small. Well, almost all my books.

An editor at a good trade press once asked me out of the blue if I had a book for him–now isn’t that every writer’s dream? The dream became tarnished within a year. I was headed on a German book tour for another book while “his” book was in press and he told me the schedule had been advanced several months.  He insisted on sending me the e-galleys for correction while I was going to be in Germany. I told him I couldn’t go over them because I’d be on and off trains and rarely in one city more than one day. It wasn’t feasible: I wouldn’t have enough uninterrupted time to concentrate and do a good job. I thought I was being a responsible author, but he ignored my concerns.

This was my first book tour in Germany and it would turn out to be the worst flight I’d ever have going to Europe.  Trouble started with being in a seat that didn’t recline behind an over-sized passenger who reclined all the way. Then I was right across from a toilet so I was enveloped in that chemical smell for the whole flight.  A kid threw up in the aisle just a few feet away from me and soon after that, the plane turned back somewhere over the Atlantic because a man had a heart attack.

We landed in Newfoundland in complete darkness which was terrifying, and I knew for sure I would be late getting to Schiphol in Amsterdam. Very late.  And that’s a confusing, crowded airport anyway.

I was able to make some calls when we landed in Newfoundland, but I was totally stressed out and unable to sleep when we were back en route to Europe.  In Amsterdam, I had to run through that enormous crowded airport to make a connecting flight, and arrived in Berlin sleepless and exhausted.  There was just enough time for me to wash my face at my hotel, put on deodorant and change my shirt before being rushed to my reading (which I still managed to introduce in pretty good German).

Because I used only a PC at home, I didn’t have a laptop in Germany and discovered to my horror that Internet cafés had German keyboards–well, of course, why shouldn’t they? But the layout and letters threw me and my emails looked like I was drunk.

Proof my book under those extra-trying circumstances? I explained to this insistent and clueless editor that even if I had time it couldn’t happen, so I asked him again to please wait till I got home in a few weeks–or proof the galleys himself. I’m not sure if he bothered, because at the next stage, back home, the book had a major goof which, he, I, and the copyeditor had all somehow missed.  This happens in publishing all the time as any author will tell you: mistakes slip through. But if I’d had the galleys and had time for them (say, with only half as many readings on my schedule), I would have caught the problem.

It was too expensive to reset the book at this late date–that’s what the publisher told me. So the book I was so proud of wasn’t published in as polished a form as it should have been, and the editor I was originally flattered to work with turned into an unsympathetic jerk.

An author friend told me when my career had just gotten started that the only thing worse than not being published was being published.  It opened you up to a range of shocks and disappointments you never knew existed. But I’m glad my career has proven his wisdom true only sometimes, and that this editor was a very rare exception for me.

Happy-Writer1Lev Raphael is the author of 25 books in many genres which you can find on Amazon, including Assault With a Deadly Lie, a suspense novel about militarized cops, which was a finalist for a Midwest Book Award.

The Day I Defended Fifty Shades of Grey (!)

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Fifty-Shades-of-GreyYes, I know the book is awful in every possible way. I’ve blogged about it several times on The Huffington Post and just recently, in a sex writing workshop, I used one of its sex scenes as an example of very bad writing. Here’s some of the excerpt  I chose:

His hands run down my body and over my breasts as he reaches the dip at the base of my neck with his lips. He swirls the tip of his nose around it then begins a very leisurely cruise with his mouth, heading south, following the path of his hands, down the sternum to my breasts. Each one is kissed and nipped gently and my nipples tenderly sucked. Holy crap. My hips start swaying and moving of their own accord, grinding to the rhythm of his mouth on me….Reaching my navel, he dips his tongue inside, and then gently grazes my belly with his teeth. My body bows off the bed…..His nose glides along the line between my belly and my pubic hair, biting me gently, teasing me with his tongue. Sitting up suddenly, he kneels at my feet, grasping both my ankles and spreading my legs wide.

Holy shit. He grabs my left foot, bends my knee, and brings my foot to his mouth. Watching and assessing every reaction, he tenderly kisses each of my toes, then bites each one of them softly on the pads. When he reaches my little toe, he bites harder, and I convulse, whimpering. He glides his tongue up my instep–and I can no longer watch him. It’s too erotic. I’m going to combust.

When they read this scene, the students quickly identified all the things that were wrong with it in a spirited and hilarious discussion. Short list: the sex is all exterior and clinical; the “geography” is weird; the voice shifts in peculiar ways; the writing is anything but erotic; and you should never have to tell readers a sex scene is sexy.

asterisk blog photoTo prepare for the workshop, I’d gone over Fifty Shades of Grey carefully a month before which is why when I saw the excerpt below all over Facebook recently, I had to cry Foul!  I knew it was fake. And I was also pretty sure I had previously used the same freaky and funny lines quoted when handing out a list of winners or runners-up in the Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest to a fiction writing class. Or I’d at least considered using them.

bogus quoteAs bad a writer as James is, this isn’t her special kind of bad. This is different. It’s just a shade more grotesque. And while Christian Grey is lots of things, none of them interesting, he doesn’t mewl. Maybe the book would have been better if he had.

So there I was on Facebook, letting people know the quote was bogus, after defending such greats as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain from misquotation.  I asked people not to re-post it.  Why? Because E.L. James deserves full recognition for her own brand of lousy writing and nobody else’s, thanks to her trademark lines like “My subconscious has reared her somnambulant head.” and “I slice another piece of venison, holding it against my mouth.”

A classic is a classic, after all.

Lev Raphael is the author of 25 books in genres from memoir to mystery which you can find on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Is Reading Greek Mythology Toxic For Students?

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That’s the buzz at Columbia University where students published an editorial complaining about reading Greek myths in one of their classes. They said in part:

“Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom,” wrote the four students, who are members of Columbia’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board. “These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.”

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I would expect Columbia students to write somewhat better and not misuse the word “wrought,” and also to have italicized Ovid’s long poetic work that retells Greek myths rather than using quotation marks of any kind. Those things aside, what are they doing in that class? Why are they reading any texts in the Western canon if they feel the way they do?

I was in love with Greek mythology when I was in elementary school and I came from an extremely low-income background. These amazing stories fired my imagination, and though I wasn’t a person of color, I was a minority as a Jew in a majority Christian country. Worse than that, I lived in a house steeped in horror and trauma because my parents were Holocaust survivors. Greek mythology offered me escape, not oppression. It didn’t exclude me, it offered me wings. Anything that was different and exciting gave me a pathway to freedom.

Is there any book anywhere that couldn’t require a trigger warning? Think of The Great Gatsby which some students have complained about for its domestic abuse, graphic violence, and suicide. As blogger Abigail Breslin puts it so well:

“In reality, trigger warnings are unrealistic….They are the dream-child of a fantasy in which the unknown can be labeled, anticipated, and controlled. What trigger warnings promise — protection — does not exist. The world is simply too chaotic, too out-of-control for every trigger to be anticipated, avoided, and defused.”

What would be helpful and productive is for professors to do what many I know already do: ask students at the beginning of a class to inform them privately if they have any issues that might interfere with classroom learning and proceed from there. But blanket warnings on syllabi or books themselves are a waste of time and verge on the ridiculous.

Lev Raphael is the author of 25 books in genres from memoir to mystery which you can find on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.