Recent Lessons Learned at the Craig House

I’m a firm believer in learning our lessons. I mean, if we don’t learn from our mistakes, then what’s the use in our making them, right? And yes, some lessons are those we have to repeat over and over before the light bulb comes on and we reach the amazingly intelligent conclusion of, “Duh.”

Okay, so I admit it, we at the Craig house have experienced our share of “duh” moments. Below are a few lessons we at the Craig house have learned over the years.



Hubby: Do not microwave a toothbrush. Yes, it sounds reasonable that to stick it in a cup of water and set the time on one minute might be sure to kill the germs and therefore save you from the $1.99 of having to purchase a new one every three weeks, but it doesn’t work.

Me: When hubby says he’ll fix something, insist he doesn’t. (Remember carpet cleaning and plumbing episodes. Remember tooth brush!)

Son: Do not microwave a whole egg. Yes, I know you want to prove mama wrong when I say you can’t do that, but when the egg explodes coating the microwave with scrambled egg, you’re going to be sorry.

Me: Never attempt to move a feline that is about to release a hairball. Believe it or not, there are worse places for a hairball to land other than where you thought it might end up.

Son: To clean a cell phone you DO NOT run it through the washing machine. To dry a cell phone, DO NOT run it through the dryer. In other words, check your dad-burn jeans before doing laundry!

Me: When son says, smell this, and has funny look on his face, don’t do it. When son says, taste this and has a green appearance in skin tone, don’t do it.

Son: Puking is not a team sport. Yes, when you were small, mama always held your head and kept a damp cloth to your brow during these times of needs. At eighteen, and with a man-size stomach, you are lucky if mom tosses a wet rag at you and says I hope everything comes out all right.

Son: Just because it’s in the refrigerator doesn’t mean it’s still edible. P.S. Refer to lesson above for reference.

Hubby: Never start whining about losing your glasses until after you check the top of your head.

Me: When bad odors are suddenly emitted into the air while in the car, don’t assume the obvious and think it will eventually fade, instead ask son if he just took off his shoes.

Me: Never attempt to wax my own eyebrows. (No explanation needed.)

Me: Always pay close attention to how you spell the word “public.” To remove the “l” from the word can change the entire meaning of a sentence. Especially if said sentence is being posted online where the world can read about it.

Son: Never ask your mom to cut your hair when she’s mad at you. (No explanation needed.)

Me: Never loan cell phone to son who doesn’t check pockets before washing.

Me: Never ask your aunt, who hasn’t said the word sex, thought about sex, or had sex in twenty years, what she thought of your romance novel.

Hubby: Never ever, under any circumstances, ask your wife what happened to her eyebrows.



Okay…so there you have it. Some of the life lessons we have learned at the Craig house. What about you guys? Any lessons you could share? Come on, I shared.

Crime Scene Christie

It Just Figures

You ever have those things happen that you're absolutely sure only happen to you and could have only happened to you at that particular moment? Don't answer that, Christie, we've heard enough of your stories to be scared when you leave the house. :)

So it wasn't an elaborate thing, but I get really amused with ironies in life. I was driving to work the other day and talking to one of my friends about our never ending struggle with diet. We're both emotional eaters, so boredom, stress, happiness, excitement...pretty much anything but sleep makes us want to eat. Stress is the worst though, and since we're both very busy people with tons of responsibility, we fight the battle to indulge ourselves every day.

Now since I spend most all day every day sitting and typing - either at home or at work - it makes it particularly hard for me to avoid "picking" at food. After all, I'm just sitting there, right? Why not have something to graze on all day? And if I choose carrot sticks, we wouldn't even be talking. But no, my biggest downfall is caramel corn - specifically Poppycock that I get at Walgreens up the road from the office. So I was telling Cari that I work and work and work and kept the thoughts of Poppycock from my mind as long as possible but then eventually I just decide to get it over with go get a bag so that I stop obsessing. And then it never fails, that is the day that Walgreens is selling them buy one get one free.

Now, who in their right mind is only going to pick up one bag when the second costs nothing and their is no discount at all for just purchasing one?

So we get off the phone and I manage to steer past Walgreens and instead turn into a QT gas station. They sell this honeynut cheerios snack mix that is much lower in fat that other choices and is far better for me than the caramel corn. So I head into the store, pick up my bag of snack mix and head to the counter, pleased with myself for skipping Walgreens and going for the lower fat snack. So the guy picks up the bag, scans it, then says to me "these are buy one get one free."

AAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

So I head out to my car with two friggin' bags of snack mix and call Cari back. She'd probably still laughing.

Deadly (double for nothing) DeLeon

Mystery Author Ed Lynskey

Please join me in welcoming mystery author, Ed Lynskey. As much as I love funny books, every once in a while I’m in the mood for a real heart pounding, stay-up-all-night, edge-of-your-seat mystery. Like Ed’s awesome P.I. Frank Johnson series. So, Ed, take it away…


Judging a Book by Its Title: How Mysteries Get Named

Like all authors, I spend a lot of sweat and blood drawing up short lists of prospective titles for my crime fiction novels and then pruning the list down to pick the sure-fired winner (hopefully). I do have a few pet peeves on novel titles. They shouldn’t be too long. They should be original without being outrageous. They should be memorable. They shouldn’t be too cute. But then how do I apply all those rules to compile a short list in the first place?

Bob Randisi (founder of the Shamus Awards) has written he searches for a title that’s unique and sticks out in the reader’s mind. I like that advice. I seem to gravitate to the Walter Mosley and John D. MacDonald school by also using colors to create my first two P.I. Frank Johnson titles (The Dirt-Brown Derby, The Blue Cheer). Colors strike an emotional chord in the readers’ minds. One color that doesn’t appeal to me -- and is perhaps overused -- is black, closely followed by the color red.

Sometimes a key phrase can be lifted from the novel’s prose and pressed into service to make a nifty title such as James M. Cain’s masterful noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. I’ll always think of John Garfield starring in the first movie adaptation saying those fatal words in a wooden voice. Reading the title, my first question is why does the postman ring twice? So from the get-go, my curiosity is engaged. That’s salesmanship. Michael Collins (pseudonym for Dennis Lynds) published one of his P.I. Dan Fortune books, Blue Death, from the stark physical description of a drowned victim looking blue.

One-word titles leave me wary. Sure, a single word is easier to remember for the reader (i.e., the buyer), but many one-word titles have already been taken and used over and over. “Deadfall”, for instance, shows up twenty times on Amazon including as a Hardy Boys title before I stopped counting them. On the other hand, Bill Pronzini has released his titles in the excellent, long-running Nameless Detective series under one-word titles, including Deadfall. Go figure.

Sometimes the titles are a skillful play on words. Donna Andrews does this with clever effectiveness (No Nest for the Wicket. We’ll Always Have Parrots. Owl’s Well That Ends Well -- you get the idea). I’m not witty enough to pull this off without sounding clunky and cute, but then my books don’t use a lot of humor either. The vintage Alfred Hitchcock short story anthologies used droll titles (Down by the Old Bloodstream, Behind the Death Ball, both from Dell). But then Sir Alfred was that sort of a personality, so the apt titles worked.

Have you ever had a jingle or phrase bounce around in your head for years? That happened to me in titling my third P.I. Frank Johnson book, Pelham Fell Here. The words appeared on a highway historical marker on the way to Culpeper, Virginia. My grandfather pulled off to the side of the road one day and read the bronze plaque.

That’s why the plaque’s title imprinted on my brain. Pelham is the small town where Frank returns after finishing his military service. Major Pelham, a fallen Confederate war hero, lent his name to the small town. Frank isn’t into hero-worship and casts a jaundiced eye on what’s been going on in Pelham during his absence. Loren D. Estleman wrote me that Pelham Fell Here is a “strong title” which is gratifying to hear. A writer always strives to pick a striking title.

For my P.I. Sharon Knowles short stories reprinted in a collection I wanted something with a gentler tone. A Clear Path to Cross is what shook out of the deliberations. It’s a longer title and I like the image it conveys. A softer edge, Sharon isn’t hardboiled like Frank is. Unlike Frank, Sharon doesn’t have any novels. Yet.

Of course, the final say in the novel’s title is the publisher. It’s right there in the written contract you sign. I’ve been fortunate in none of my titles have been rejected or altered by my publisher. My favorite anecdote on the selection of a novel’s right title is F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald wrangled over a short list of titles that just didn’t ring: Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires, Trimalchio, Trimalchio in West Egg, On the Road to West Egg, Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bouncing Lover. In the end, The Great Gatsby prevailed and the rest, as they say, is history.


Ed Lynskey
http://www.myspace.com/edlynskey

Faye Hughes On Adventures in Flying

Okay Guys, With great pleasure, I'd like to introduce you to my good buddy, Faye Hughes. She's my writing partner, my friend, my critique partner (among others) and a partner to a lot of my crimes. As a computer guru, she talks me down from all the computer ledges that I manage to get myself on. She's also nuttier than a giant slab of peanut brittle. Which explains why we are such good friends. She is, as we say in the south, a real hoot. Together we wrote, The Everything Guide to Writing A Romance Novel, which was just released this week. She is also the author of seven romance novels, two of which were optioned for TV movies. (Yeah, the girl can also write fiction.) Take it away, Faye. ~Crime Scene Christie


They say hindsight is everything. I have a tendency to agree because, looking back on my March 2007 flight to New York City, I realize how close I came to ending up on the “No Fly” list along with suspected terrorists and other “persons of interest.”

You see, I was flying from Syracuse to La Guardia, where I was going to meet Christie Craig, my critique partner and new writing partner for non-fiction in the baggage claims area. I was totally excited, if a little sleep-deprived. You see, Christie and I had talked on the phone daily but we hadn’t met in person yet, and the PASIC conference in NYC was going to be our chance to get better acquainted.

So, I lugged my too-large-for-carryon suitcase from the long-term parking garage and checked it in with the skycap, then headed inside the terminal at Syracuse’s Hancock Airport. I made my way through the security checkpoint and arrived at my gate about an hour early. I really needed coffee, but before I could grab a cup, they announced that the flight from Syracuse to LaGuardia was boarding.

WTF? I mean, you’d think somebody would have told me that the flight was leaving an hour early. Still, I grabbed my boarding pass and got in line. It was a small plane. Getting small planes balanced can be a challenge, so people rarely end up sitting in their assigned seats. As for me, well, my seat didn’t even exist. I had an “F” and there were no “F” seats. I asked the flight attendant who looked at me as if I was the last thing she wanted to deal with that morning. Hey, I don’t’ blame her. After all, she had bigger problems, like getting the plane balanced. She told me to sit anywhere. And I did and less than an hour later, I was in LaGuardia. But still no coffee.

No problem, I decided. Christie was supposed to meet me in my baggage claims area and since her flight got there earlier than mine, we would probably be able to get out of the airport and to the hotel a lot earlier than we’d expected. We could grab some lunch and, yes! Coffee!

It was a great plan. Only, my suitcase never made its way around the luggage turnstile with the rest of everyone else’s luggage. Crap, I thought. Now what? First, they assigned me to a seat number that didn’t exist and now I had no luggage.

Now, by this point, I’m sure a lot of you know what happened but, honestly, it took me another 20 minutes before I figured out that I’d taken the wrong flight to LaGuardia. (If you’re wondering why I didn’t check the flight numbers, hey, it was all I could do to find the right gate number. I seriously needed coffee that morning.)

Anyway, I figured my suitcase would arrive on the next flight, so I started calling Christie on her cell. According to her last email, her flight should have arrived. But Christie’s cell was heading straight to voicemail. (A quick bit of info about Christie, she always carries her cell phone when she travels but she rarely ever remembers to turn it on. It wouldn’t be so bad if she could remember how to access her new messages but, hey, that’s a blog for a different time.)

So, there I was, settled in on a bench in the empty baggage claims area, waiting for Christie and my luggage.

Christie got there before my suitcase. I knew it was her when I first laid eyes on her. A small blonde woman in a hat dragging two large suitcases on wheels that were bigger than she was. She got to the turnstile, saw me sitting on the bench and smiled. “Hello,” she said.

I smiled back and said, “Hi, Christie.”

The look on her face was priceless.

You see, I’d seen pictures of her but all she’d seen of me was an old author photo on some of my out-of-print paperbacks. And the hair color was different.

Anyway, Christie nods and asks, “Faye?”

Okay, I couldn’t resist. I said, “Nope.”

She started to look worried then. She even glanced from side to side, to see if there were any security guards nearby. But no luck for Christie. It was just the two of us.

She said, “Um” or “Uh” and I could just see the wheels in her head spinning. Who was I? How did I know her name? And probably most important of all, Why the hell had I agreed to meet Faye at her baggage claims when we didn’t fly in on the same airline?

I started to giggle then, and that’s when she started seriously looking for security, but I quickly confessed that I was Faye.

Then she said, “But your plane’s not supposed to be here for another half hour.”

“Yeah, and did you know cell phones don’t work unless you turn them on?” We had a good laugh. Now, let’s flash forward a few hours. That night at the hotel, I received a call from Travelocity. He was very nice but he sounded just like the Travelocity gnome they have in the TV commercials. Anyway, he told me I’d taken the wrong flight and he wanted to make certain I took the right return flight. “Very naughty,” he said. “Naughty, naughty.” (You try not to burst out laughing at that kind of dialogue. I mean, the Travelocity gnome was chastising me.

Then he made me write down the info and I hung up. I joked to Christie that TSA should contract the Travelocity gnome to handle security. I mean, he had busted me about the wrong flight and nobody at the airline figured it out. “But that voice,” I said. “Very naughty?” I nearly fell off my chair laughing.

I guess I was a little disrespectful of the gnome because at 7:00 the next morning, a guy from “hotel security”, dressed in one of those MIB type black suits, unlocked the door to our hotel room and came in to give us our personal “wake up call.”

Only we hadn’t requested a “wake up call.” Personal or otherwise.

And when we called down to the front desk to ask about it, they told us that hotel security never unlocks and enters a guest’s room to deliver a wake up call.

I figure I learned a valuable lesson that day. Okay, maybe a couple of them. First, always drink coffee before flying, or before boarding a flight. And two, never make fun of the Travelocity gnome. He may seem inanimate and cute but if he calls your hotel room to tell you that you’ve been ‘naughty’, you’d best be respectful, or you might end up with a MIB type in a suit in your hotel room the next morning for a non-requested wake up call.

Respect the gnome. Seriously. Always respect the gnome.

Faye Hughes

www.FayeHughes.net

www.WritewithUs.net

I’m an International Superstar!

Okay, well, maybe I’m still working on the superstardom thing… but one of my books has gone international! This week I got copies of the Polish version of my first book, Spying in High Heels! It’s been released as Sledztwo na wysokich obcasach in Poland by Amber publishing. Check out the cover - cool, huh? I have no idea what it says, but I spent all day browsing through the book. The most fun part about it are the little footnotes explaining my many Americanisms – like why “Dewey, Cheatum, & Howe” is a funny name for an attorney’s office, and what Six Flags is. I love it!

Since I don’t speak Polish in the least, I spent a good chunk of time yesterday trying to find a Polish to English dictionary online that I could use to translate the title. No such luck. Still searching. The best I can find so far is it says something "to soaring heel". Interesting…

But, in the course of my searches, I did stumble upon some very interesting facts about Poland. Did you know:

Pizza in Poland does not contain tomato sauce. The waiters bring sauce to the table in a pitcher, and you pour it on top. Sometimes the sauce is just catsup.

When American movies are dubbed for Polish TV, one man reads all the parts, even those of women and children.

The biggest section of any grocery store is the candy section.

Some Polish beer is ten per-cent alcohol.

There is a Pope channel on TV. Anytime one needs to see the pope, one can tune him in.

Polish toilet paper is made of crepe.

There is an M.D. on board every ambulance.

Doctors do not make as much as English teachers do in Poland.

The teaching of the German language at any level was forbidden in Poland for forty years after the end of World War II.

Poles peel bananas from the blossom end, not from the stem end.

Poles always carry cut flowers upside down.

Amongst all the members of the European Union, the residents of Poland marry the youngest – at and average age of 23 for women.

In Poland people wear wedding ring on the right hand.

In Polish, the English word “no” means “yeah, sure”. So, if a Polish man asks you out to dinner, don’t say “no” unless he’s really hot.

And my favorite…

Poland is currently run by identical twin brothers who serve as Prime Minister and President. They were once too-cute child stars and appeared in the 1962 movie, The Two Who Stole the Moon. (Who knows, maybe the Olsen twins have a future in politics yet!)


~Trigger Happy (or as they say in Poland, Spust Zadowolony) Halliday

'Bullet Hole the Builder' Checking In...

Hey! Just popping in to say 'howdy' as the floor covering installers are here laying my carpet! I'll snap a couple pics and post them once the floor is down and they're outta here. I'm also painting. Yes. Still.

Pictures to come!

Have a great day and rest of the week!

~Bullet Hole Bacus~

So, Like, I Was On This, Like, AMAZING Book Tour...

Jessica Anderson, Cherry Adair, Kathryn Caskie and Moi

Colleen Coble, Jade Lee's arm, Monica McInerney, Jordan Dane, Susan Mallery, Me, Elizabeth Hoyt and Kathryn Caskie

I shouldn't have to explain this one. I mean really, there's a nametag and everything.

Two cute guys who, surprisingly, were very excited to see me

Last weekend was one of the best weekends of my whole, entire, life! My publisher sent me on a book tour with 26 other authors across the state of Michigan! And look! Cute guys wanted their picture with me! Woo hoo!

Actually (and this will take the wind out of the proverbial sails a bit) the guys saw me and got all excited. One of them said, "My mom loves you! I can't believe you're here!" Anyway, these two adorable guys were so excited to have a photo with me (and apparently my chins) on their phone to send "mom," it was almost okay when they told me they were on their way to a wrestling meet. "High school or college meet?" I idiotically asked. The tall, cute guy said, and I quote, "Oh no, all ages. There will even be some old guys who are 40 there."

Oh well. Hey! Cute guys were excited to see me! Yay!

Once I got past the icky idea I was behaving like a Kougar, life went on. And it was wonderful. The Levy people who sponsor the tour of nine Meijer stores in three days spoiled us ROTTEN. Everything was taken care of from the hotels to the food to the transportation. I had a great time meeting so many wonderful authors. My kids and husband, however, are not so amused when I call out for my luxury bus or gourmet food. They still expect me to cook Spaghettios and clean toilets. Can you believe the nerve?

Probably the best part of the whole tour was talking to these brilliant, award-winning authors about the business. I'm still fairly new and am beginning to believe there is no way I'll ever learn it all. And yet these incredibly generous women (and a few fabulous men who put up with us) patiently answered my questions and didn't make fun of my wide-eyed, mouth open curiousity. And no one even tried to put a "Kick Me" sticker on my back. Not even once.

It's good to be home (at least, the guinea pigs think so - but they may just be after food) but I'd go back out with these writers any day, any time, anywhere.

The Assassin