Finding the Story in the Experience

Over the years I've taken a lot of photographs, mostly in India. But I've also missed a lot of good ones too. My favorites are usually those of people engaged in traditional work, exhibiting skills and practices that are no longer commonly known. Perhaps I should have been an anthropologist, but I find writing about them in fiction enormously rewarding. A recent story I wrote grew out of this combined interest in photography and traditional work.

I always stay in the same hotel in Kovalam, India, and, if I'm lucky, the same room. From the terrace I can see the ocean, beaches, people passing by, and, best of all, the men climbing to harvest coconuts. I've been watching this process since 1976, when the climbers visited the lots across the street from where we lived in Trivandrum. But only from the terrace of a hotel have I managed to get photographs that show the work of the harvester.

The government of India is concerned that fewer and fewer men are taking up this profession, despite good pay for good climbers. The government has invited ideas to make climbing easier for newcomers interested in the job, but most of the ideas have been as foolish as the climbers are agile. Inventors have proposed special ladders, cherry-picking machines, and the like. Their emphasis is on safety, which is understandable. Still, the equipment is absurd compared to what humans can do, and would be almost impossible to use in many locations where the trees are growing.

Traditional climbers use only a band made from a strand of the palm leaf to anchor their feet. They climb three and four stories with nothing but their physical strength to keep them on the trunk of the palm tree. And they carry a machete at their waist. These knives are heavy to carry and to wield. At the top of the tree they hold themselves in place with one hand and cut down the coconuts with the knife in the other.

These men are a marvel, but their skill is not as rare as one might think. An autorickshaw driver invited me to meet his family. We drove to his home and there, as I chatted with his wife and daughter, he offered me a drink. When I thanked him and said yes, he turned and climbed the coconut tree leaning over his one-story house. It was the most natural thing in the world for him to do, apparently.

I've watched these men climb and harvest since 1976, but not until I began talking about them with the hotel manager did I learn about their lives. As a young (well, younger) man he knew several as friends, and he could explain aspects of the profession few others knew about. The more he talked, the more I could feel a story taking shape. I wasn't sure what it would be exactly but I knew there was one in there.

A couple of months later, after I returned to the States, I wrote "Perfect in Every Way," a story about Anita Ray and a climber who works for Hotel Delite. The story concerns an older climber who marries a younger woman. I sold the story to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, which has published a number of Anita Ray stories.

 

Anita's current investigation, in For the Love of Parvati, explores another aspect of Kerala, the pilgrimage season and practices for visiting Sabarimala, a holy site open to men and women of all faiths (with some restrictions on age for women).

I writ some of my best stories sitting at a desk at Hotel Aparna, glancing out the window at the ocean, the climbers, crows, and the occasional tourist taking the stairs to the roof of a nearby hotel.

ARCs, ARCs, and More ARCs

At a recent workshop a member of the audience asked the three writers on the panel on marketing what they did with their ARCs. One writer answered, “Dust them.” The audience laughed. For many it was a laugh of recognition. As I drove home I thought about the question again. Like many others, I assume everyone else already knows the answer, has accomplished this or that particular goal, and I’m the only one racing to catch up. Perhaps. Perhaps not. On the off chance that other writers are wondering what to do with a box of ARCs, I’ll tell you what I did with mine.

After eight books, I still get excited when a box of ARCs arrives. When the copies of my most recent Anita Ray mystery showed up, I grabbed a knife and slit the tape along the sides, and opened the top. The cover was gorgeous. The box held five ARCs, but I didn’t think about that because I was so taken with the cover. I love the cover.  And then I thought, only five? Okay. I can work with five. The next day another box arrived—a much larger box.

Granted, I’m not very good with numbers but I think I counted 50 ARCs. Fifty? Egads! What do you do with 50 proof copies? I don’t even know fifty people. Well, for a couple of weeks I did nothing. I stared at the box sitting on the floor, and then I got busy.

First, I went over the list of reviewers my publisher included, to make sure I didn’t duplicate her efforts. My editor sent out 22 review copies to the major review and crime magazines and review sites. Some of the individuals I contacted about reviewing replied that they would request a copy from one of the places they wrote for. I didn’t include these individuals in my list of reviewers approached.

I have no foolproof way to find people willing to read and review a book, but I bless the day Goodreads and other sites were born. Most online reviewers are deluged with books to review, and most are titles they haven’t requested. Sending them one more to consider is simply a waste of paper and postage. I try to focus on people who want the ARC and are most likely to post a review. I can’t require a review, but I can certainly indicate that this is a goal, and then I hope for the best.

Second, I planned a number of giveaways. I gave away 10 books on Goodreads. I gave away 10 books on LibraryThing. I gave away 7 books on DorothyL (plus a PDF of the novel). I took 6 books to India and gave them away to friends, who may or may not post a review, and including one friend who has a lending library. I gave away 4 books to friends who are also reviewers who asked for them. I sent out 2 to professional reviewers I do not know personally. I sent 2 to my alma maters. I asked 5 friends to review the ARC. I have 3 left to give away, and I’m keeping 1 for myself.

I mailed almost all these copies, and the woman at the post office thinks I’m something special. I handed her the last batch of mailers, and promised her the packages did not contain . . . . for the last time. Their zip codes straggled from the East Coast to Hawaii. “You have quite a long reach,” she said. I smiled. Really, I was quite chuffed by that. We writers have to get our strokes where they can.

And that’s what I do with my ARCs. What do you do? I have three left. They can go anywhere.

I'll send one ARC to one person who comments, picked at random, tomorrow morning.

Six Steps for a Book Launch

In May, Five Star will publish For the Love of Parvati, the third book in the Anita Ray series, featuring  Indian American photographer Anita Ray, who lives in South India at her aunt’s tourist hotel. Anita first appeared in a short story published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, “A Murder Made in India,” in the October 2003 issue. Since then, eleven more Anita Ray stories have appeared in AHMM and Level Best Books anthologies, with another in the pipeline.

Now that the book is written, my job is to launch it on what I hope is a very successful path. Launching a book, as most writers now, is almost as much work as writing it, but I have a few established practices that help me get the word out and generate sales.

1. I compile a list of professional reviewers and review sites, invite them to review the ARC. (These do not duplicate those contacted by Five Star.) Some say yes, and some say no. I send the ARCs out about two to three months in advance, depending on the reviewer. I also ask colleagues, friends, and local reviewers to review. I also do giveaways on Goodreads and LibraryThing. Depending on the reviewer, I may include a letter from the publisher indicating the type of story, etc. This year I have 45 ARCs for the third Anita Ray, almost twice what I had for the second book.

2. I order updated bookmarks with the cover of the new book. I give these to everyone, and even put them into reply envelopes for bills, etc. I also make sure I have enough business cards. I put cards and bookmarks on every chair at a book event (if there is seating), and hand them out at events like book fairs. For reasons that elude me, I find it easy to hand these out to strangers at events when I normally wouldn’t even say hello to a stranger.

3. I begin setting up events--talks, panels, etc., anything that gets my name out there and gives me a chance to interact with other people. I admit that I don’t do as many of these as I used to, but I’ve found a variety of events is more useful to me than a high number of traditional events like library panels.

4. I use social media, so I'll be posting regularly on my own blog plus do a few guest blogs. I post on FB and I am learning to use Pinterest, especially since I have wonderful covers. I don’t use these sites to sell my book. Instead I talk about writing, what I love about India, and other interests. No one wants to get constant requests to “like” my page, show up at my “virtual” launch, and the rest of it. If I haven’t something interesting to say about writing and other topics, then it’s better for me not to write.

5. This one is harder, but I recommend it if you can pull it off. I recently sold another short story featuring Anita Ray to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. This will probably be published in the coming year, which will reinforce interest, I hope, in the novel For the Love of Parvati, coming out in May 2014, as well as the two previous books, Under the Eye of Kali (2010) and The Wrath of Shiva (2012).

6. I use Wattpad to introduce readers to my series characters by posting short short stories for free. I also have posted the opening scene from a longer work, with a link to the site where the reader can buy the whole book. Unless you’re a very well known writer, it takes time to build up a readership on this site, but it does build.

Like almost any other writer, I would rather be writing than promoting. I doubt I will ever get over the feeling of foolishness of talking about myself and my books. But once in a while, to my great delight, I strike up a conversation with someone who loves all sorts of mysteries, India, Indian food, and meeting strangers. That’s when I don’t care if the person buys my book or not because I'm enjoying the conversation so much, and that’s when he or she usually does buy it.

The first two books in the series are available as eBooks and in paper through Amazon. You can read an Anita Ray story at www.susanoleksiw.com

Reading with a Purpose

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of reading for research. Most of the books are on technical matters, to help me recall terms I used to know but have mostly forgotten. Some of the more commonly used ones came back right away, but others still look a bit funny. This got me thinking about other purposes for reading.

When I began writing fiction I had to unlearn writing like an academic. I had written a novel and short fiction in college, and been published in student literary and humor magazines. I turned to scholarly work in graduate school, and focused on academic work for years. Returning to fiction meant unlearning one style of composing and recovering other ways of thinking on paper.

Of course I read a lot of crime fiction over the years and that certainly prepared me. I thought in terms of clues and characters, and laying things out in a pattern. But I found that I was terse in narrative passages. To overcome this I turned to writers who were almost prolix. I read classic mysteries such as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, and A. Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. I also read Anne Perry’s mysteries for the leisurely way she sets a scene or builds up a location and setting.

For capturing character and the sinister feeling of a stranger I can think of no better writer to study than Edgar Allan Poe. He goes so deeply into his characters’ feelings and attitudes that I sometimes wonder if he was slowly driving himself mad. Ruth Rendell achieves much the same effect with her many novels. One of the best in my opinion is Judgment in Stone, which follows the inevitable path to murder of an illiterate housekeeper.

Other writers have taught me other skills. Some writers are strong in dialogue, and others can explain the technical working of anything. The latter is a skill no writer should fail to learn. Once I learned the sequence of steps in making a particular machine work, I could see other processes more clearly even if I wasn’t writing about them. I think of this as understanding the bone structure in a face while you are sculpting or painting a portrait.

Setting a story in a location not well known to all readers requires a judicious use of details, knowing what to include and what to omit. James Lee Burke is well known and admired for his rich depiction of Louisiana, and Dana Stabenow has made Alaska her own as well as a vivid location accessible to readers. Nevada Barr explores the natural world in various parks, and Agatha Christie has set novels in ancient Egypt and then contemporary Middle East. I have learned from all these writers how to make a location come alive and ground the mystery. I use India as the setting for the Anita Ray series, a country I for the first time visited in the 1970s.

All books teach us something but not the same thing. Writers have to read as widely as possible, especially in areas that don’t normally appeal to them, if they want to ensure that their work is as strong as it can be. I try to read against my interests to broaden myself. At present I’m reading about a certain sport. I’m not a sports enthusiast but I want to be sure that my descriptions are accurate and that my character’s behaviors are plausible.

Reading with a purpose, as a writer, is far more than reading good literature to expose ourselves to the best the written word has to offer. Reading with a purpose is a way to absorb the skills and abilities of other writers we do not ourselves possess.

Susan Oleksiw is the author of the Anita Ray Mystery series, featuring Indian American photographer Anita Ray, as well as the Melingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva. www.susanoleksiw.com