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February 24, 2020 By Joyce Simons

The Mystery of Phutatorius’s Breeches

The other day my critique partner pointed out that I hadn’t published a blog post in a while. In a few weeks, I’ll be attending a writers conference where I hope to meet similarly aspiring authors as well as literary agents. And if any of them takes the time to follow the link on my business card, I want them to experience a blog that’s as fresh as a just-baked baguette — but nowhere near as crusty. So, to get back in the swing of blogging, I had to pick a new topic to write about.

Thus began my foray into Phutatorius’s breeches.

Let me begin by saying that I took time away from blogging to draft a new novel. Researching a novel is, for me, the fun part. It’s also time-consuming, especially if you find yourself in the zone, experiencing flow, living in kairos, or however you describe the sensation of being so immersed in what you’re doing that time flies. The next step, outlining, requires me to exercise more gray matter. I took a class at Grubstreet on outlining (thank you, Blair Hurley, for the excellent instruction), and mapped my story to the unraveling of the psychopathic mind. Then came the hard part, which is also fun, but which can be a little agonizing too: writing manuscript pages. To ease my way back into blogging, I followed a similar path: research-outline-draft. If I was going to blog about being on hiatus, I needed to research the etymology of that word. Google led me to the Merriam-Webster website where, in blue and white, I found this intriguing factoid:

In the 18^th century, Laurence Sterne used the word humorously in his novel Tristram Shandy, writing of “the hiatus in Phutatorius’s breeches.”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hiatus

What a gem! So many questions popped into my head at once. Who was Phutatorius? Why couldn’t I remember him after having read Tristram Shandy? Why did Laurence Sterne write about his breeches? Did the word hiatus accurately describe what lay inside them? Imagine the thrill I felt when a little googling later, I learned that the hiatus in Phutatorius’s breeches was the point of entry of a piping hot chestnut. The results of my research were getting weirder by the minute.

Now I don’t want to drag you down the rabbit hole of why Phutatorius was harboring the fruit of the deciduous beech tree inside his pants. Or how he got it out. Or why it was hot before it got there. What I do want to do is share my consternation upon discovering that, contrary to the quote on the Merriam-Webster website, quotations from Tristram Shandy on other websites use the word aperture, not hiatus, in relation to Phutatorius’s breeches.

Which brings us to the mystery du jour, which has nothing to do with the chestnut inside said breeches, and everything to do with how the word aperture came to replace hiatus.

I had to wonder: Did Laurence Sterne really invent the word hiatus? If so, why doesn’t it appear consistently alongside Phutatorius’s breeches? How did it morph into aperture, which (according to Merriam-Webster) was first used in the 15^th century and almost always refers to a lens? By whose hand was one word swapped for the other? An agent? Editor? Publisher? Typesetter? Did someone deem hiatus too new a word to appear in a contemporary novel? Or did someone gaze into a crystal ball all the way to the 20^th century and declare that one day, hiatus would be used almost exclusively to describe a break from activity or a type of hernia? And if that was the case, why not just use the word opening instead?

This hiatus here, aperture there discovery punctured my bubble of hope that I could somehow draw a pithy comparison between a literary classic and my own vacation from blogging. I’ve been on hiatus. Technically, you could say I was suspended in an aperture of time, but that just sounds flowery for no good reason. Though some excellent writers I know have allowed a little purple prose to blossom on the pages of early drafts.

Soon, after I finish the first draft of my new novel and before I plunge into adventures in revision, I’ll be back to blogging more regularly. Think of me as a little chestnut seeking respite from social media. Until then, thank you to my readers for your patience, to Blair Hurley for giving me a kick in the breeches to figure out my story, and to my critique partner for suggesting I bring my hiatus — or aperture — to a close.

November 18, 2018 By Joyce Simons

Exposing Your Roots

Last week I attended my first New England Crime Bake, a conference for crime-fiction writers and readers. Every year it seems that Crime Bake sells out within weeks of registration opening up, and now I understand why. It’s small (about 300 attendees), it has an outstanding lineup of speakers (this year’s guest of honor was the legendary Walter Mosley), and it offers access to well-known literary agents and editors who are there to help writers like me pitch our manuscripts.

As with any new environment, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Sure, there would be people milling about, brandishing canvas bags stamped with the manacled red lobster that is Crime Bake’s logo. There would most likely be more women than men. And I suspected that many of the attendees would be “of a certain age,” as they say in France. But what took me by complete surprise was the sight that greeted me at the opening session. I had chosen a seat at the back of the ballroom to survey the landscape, and spotted a woman who seemed to have sustained a massive head injury. Swaths of black hair were missing from the back of her head. I silently applauded her fortitude for attending this conference following what must have surely been a traumatic incident.

And then she turned her head slightly, and it occurred to me that something didn’t look quite right. I pointed my iPhone camera at her and enlarged the image for a better look. That’s when I realized I wasn’t looking at a head injury; I was looking at a bad dye job. This woman had neglected to color the hair on the back of her head. In “Diamonds are Forever,” James Bond said he didn’t care what color a woman’s hair was as long as the collar and cuffs matched. I might add that it doesn’t matter as long as the front and back match too.

It made me acutely aware of how many people see what’s in front of them (say, in the bathroom mirror), and don’t pay as much attention to what may be lurking behind them. It’s a strangely apt analogy for the job of a crime writer. According to Dan Brown, our job is to control the flow of information to the reader. We get to drop clues in the right places to sustain the reader’s curiosity without giving away the ending. We get to show them what we want them to see, shine a light on things we want them to notice, and distract them from what we want to withhold until later.

Three panelists and a moderator:
David Handler, moderator Hank Phillippi Ryan, Walter Mosley, and Joe Finder
at New England Crime Bake 2018

In each of the novels in my Knitting Detective series, my goal is to marry the uniqueness of the setting with a crime that could only be carried out in that place. It’s a challenge I love because I get to immerse myself in the history, culture, customs, patois, etc. of the French city or region where the story is set. Right now, I’m struggling to piece together the puzzle of how a string of murders maps to a local legend. And my experience at Crime Bake couldn’t be timelier. Not only because we all helped each other move our projects forward, but also because the lady whose photo I snapped reminded me of the importance of sustaining suspense from start to finish, striking the right balance between revealing and concealing information, and resolving the mystery in the most satisfying way possible.

Thanks this week go to my fellow Crime Bake attendees, especially Meg Ruley, Hank Phillippi Ryan, and Paula Munier, who made themselves available to me for specific feedback and advice. As Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient Kate Flora said it best at the end of conference, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Amen.

October 27, 2018 By Joyce Simons

Place as Character

If you’ve ever watched Sex and the City, then you know that New York City is the series’ fifth lead character, so much so that in one episode Carrie calls it her “boyfriend.” Whether or not you’ve seen or even like the series, it’s an outstanding example of capturing the spirit of a place and making it integral to a story. Could Sex and the City have been as successful if it was set in Chicago? Paris? Hong Kong? I doubt it. Some story lines would not have been possible and others would have been dramatically different, as would the whole gestalt of the series. Just off the top of my head, I remember pivotal scenes set in Yankee Stadium, St. Mark’s Place, Columbus Circle, the New York Public Library, and on the Staten Island Ferry. There are even guided tours of the most iconic locations featured on the show.

I like the idea of the map above. But there’s a big problem with it that only someone who knows NYC would pick up on. As the song goes, “The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.” That means “downtown” should be at the bottom of the map. Even putting it left would be better than right. I’m all turned around when I look at this map. It makes me think that whoever created it doesn’t know NYC all that well.

It’s a mistake I don’t want to make in my own stories.

I’m currently plotting the origin story of The Knitting Detective series, which reveals how Maxime Martin became an amateur sleuth, and I’m setting it in Brittany. A Scandal in Nice takes place in Nice (obviously) and each subsequent story will be set in a different city or region of France. My goal is to get to know each of those locations as well as I know NYC (where I grew up) and Nice (where I spent many months) in order to do it justice. If my stories inspire readers to travel to those places and discover their wonders, then I’ll have done my job well. There’s no other country I know of that has such a rich variety of history, customs, food, culture, etc. from one city to the next. And this phenomenon is made all the more wondrous when you consider that all of France could fit inside the state of Texas.

The challenge is to create a story that works because it’s set in Brittany. And not just the entire region of Brittany, but a specific departément that embodies its maritime past, rugged coastline, historic sites, plethora of offshore islands (some accessible on foot at low tide), megalithic monuments, and reputation as a land of mystery, myth, and superstition. Add to that the fact that it has its own language (Breton), and there’s a lot of material to leverage.

Just yesterday, I shared the plot I had sketched out with a friend and fellow writer who’s a critique partner. I knew it had many moving parts and was on the complex side. What I didn’t realize was that it had too many parts, too many complexities. So when she advised me to use Brittany as a character, I knew it was back to the drawing board for me! Time to simplify my plot and amp up the complexity of my characters– including the setting. And what a wonderful time of year to immerse myself in a setting as lush as it is spooky. What better place to hide and then reveal a dead body or two?

One way to tap into the spirit of a place is to study its legends. You could say that Brittany has its own share of origin stories. They’re fantastical and eerie, and at least one features the devil himself. When I stumbled upon it, I knew it was the story around which I would weave my own. So while many of you will be celebrating Halloween with parties and trick-or-treaters, I’ll be doing copious amounts of research that I love doing to create a convincing backdrop— and foreground— for an old-fashioned murder mystery.

Wish me luck! Maybe one day people will line up to follow a Knitting Detective itinerary through France.

Thanks this week go to two new friends and fellow writers: Megan my critique partner and Corinne my Bretonne language exchange partner, who introduced me to l’Ankou, the personification of death in Breton mythology. I can’t wait to hear what they think of my next plot outline— and to plan my visit to Brittany to make sure it’s authentic!

August 24, 2018 By Joyce Simons

Slow Food for Thought

At any point in time, I have a stack of books piled up around my home and waiting to be read. It’s quite the hodgepodge of genres and topics. And I never choose just one. I give into “shiny object syndrome” and start reading about whatever topic grabs my attention in the moment. Right now, for instance, I’m reading four books: a primer on game theory; SLOW KNITTING by Hannah Thiessen; a novel that a friend just sold to a publisher in an enviable book deal; and a bestselling thriller.

Now you might think that only the last two books would have something in common. But, as odd is it may sound, trust and trustworthiness are integral to the first three.

Game theory isn’t about playing games; it’s about what it means to solve a game, how people signal trustworthiness, and the idea that everyone acts in his own best interest (the same idea made popular by John Nash). If you liked the movie A BEAUTIFUL MIND, you might consider reading up on game theory.

I discovered SLOW KNITTING when I was e-shopping on a high-end home furnishings website. I stopped to wonder why a site like that was selling this book, so I checked it out of my local library. Within minutes of opening it, I decided to buy my own copy. It’s a beautiful book about the craft of knitting. And I don’t use that term lightly. Craft is more than the manufacture of a thing; it is the purposeful application of an artistic skill to create that thing. The table of contents alone communicates the degree of craftmanship that Ms. Thiessen applies to her subject matter: source carefully, produce thoughtfully, think environmentally, experiment fearlessly, explore openly. They’re actions you could apply to many areas of a life lived with purpose.

Which brings me to the third and fourth books on my nightstand. A friend is letting me read the manuscript for the literary mystery her agent just sold to a prestigious publisher. I had been reading thrillers and mystery series the same way I might eat to the bottom of a bucket of popcorn: a little mindlessly and with no expectation of nutritional value. But the epigraph alone told me what to expect: this book was going to be no bucket of popcorn. It was going to be a slow food meal, created with great care and craftsmanship. The opening paragraphs confirmed that belief. I was stunned by the quality of the writing. Even if I didn’t know where the story was going to take me, I realized very quickly that I trusted this writer—not because I knew her personally, or because a lot of publishers wanted to buy her book, but because it was meticulously crafted.

I quickly abandoned the fourth book I was reading because it felt like fast food in comparison. And I decided, after having watched a few episodes of The Real Housewives of NYC back-to-back, to give my brain a nutritious treat.

Anything created with a lot of care, whether it’s something to eat, play, read, or wear, deserves to be sensed to its fullest, and doing that takes time. So, as I head into the next round of revisions of my own novel, hoping to make it something that readers will one day want to own and not just borrow and then toss aside, I’ll leave you with the opening paragraphs of my all-time favorite novel so you can see just what I mean:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Thanks this week go to the late, great Vladimir Nabokov, whose words fill me with wonder each time I read them. I’ve bought more copies of LOLITA than I can remember because each time I loan one to a friend, I never get it back. Ah well. At least I can console myself knowing that I gave him or her something nutritious to feast upon.

July 29, 2018 By Joyce Simons

Glimpsing the Road Not Taken

It’s official: after ten months of study at the University of Washington, I’m now a private investigator. At the recommendation of crime novelist Ingrid Thoft, I enrolled in the UW’s Private Investigation program to learn the skills my protagonist will need to solve crimes. At the end of it, I received a Certificate in Private Investigation as well as a P.I. license. It’s just a piece of paper but for less than $20, I can buy a hoity toity P.I. badge because, as one of my instructors pointed out, it’s a lot more convincing when you knock on a witness’s door to wave a badge instead of a piece of paper:

Now the curious thing is that it was never my intention to become a practicing private eye. But after three courses, a deep dive in Washington State law, as well as firsthand accounts of what it’s like to be a criminal investigator and a civil one, I got swept up in the excitement.

In my last course, the instructor asked us to design our P.I. business cards. It was my favorite assignment (far more satisfying, imho, than recreating a car crash investigation, for instance) because I had to think up a name for my P.I. agency (which I have yet to open) and put my pseudo-design skills to use. And while I was going to all the trouble of choosing a catchy name, I wanted to make sure the domain name was available, just in case. Here’s what I came up with:

So now I’m in a bit of pickle. I’ve chosen my specialty (fraud investigation), and I’ve even started networking with people who have expertise in the field. One of my classmates, who is also a mystery novelist, chose surveillance as her specialty and suggested we go into business together. This could be fun! We are so unalike and yet compatible that our skills would complement each other quite nicely. She has as endless supply of patience (which will serve her well in surveillance); I have almost none. I have technical skills (which will serve me well in detecting fraud); hers are scarce. She wants to take the agency exam (which is required before we can open our own agency); I have no interest in sitting through another exam. She doesn’t seem terribly interested in setting up our agency website; I already plunked down $10 to buy whodunitpi.com from GoDaddy and set up a website (www.whodunitpi.com).

There’s no rush to decide whether to moonlight as a P.I. while I work on my next novel. But I feel like a path has opened up before me. Now I just need to decide whether to set foot on it. It’s an intriguing proposition. If I don’t at least try to investigate a case or two before committing to any bigger undertaking (like opening an agency), will I regret it?

Strangely, sometimes you get a glimpse of the road not taken. And it feels like time stalled and threw open a window for you to peek into. I know this because it has happened to me before.

Back when I was in my twenties, I dreamed of living in Paris. At the time, my written French was respectable but my spoken French was not. Nonetheless, I answered a Help Wanted ad for a translator in The New York Times. I was called in for an interview and made it all the way to the last step: meeting with the president for a sit-down in French. He told me I had passed the translation test with flying colors but my conversational skills were lacking. He was in a pickle himself because the only other candidate (whose name was Laura, I discovered, when we rode the bus to the interview together) who had made it that far had outstanding conversational skills but her test scores were lower. What to do?

The answer seemed obvious: choose me! But he chose Laura. And my heart broke a little when I learned that I would not be moving to Paris.

A couple of years later, I answered another Help Wanted ad in The New York Times, was flown to Seattle, was offered an amazing job, and started my new life here in the Pacific Northwest. But part of me always wondered: what if I had gotten that job in Paris? What would my life have been like? I pictured myself going to a whirlwind of parties with fascinating francophones, living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, breakfasting on croissants, maybe even meeting someone who lived in a chateau. It was all very Funny Face meets Amélie meets Midnight in Paris.

And then, shortly after starting my new job, I was offered the chance to go to a conference in Minneapolis. I had always wants to go to Minneapolis since I grew up watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show and wondered whether the city was anything like it was portrayed in that filmed-in-Studio City sitcom. Maybe I’d even toss a beret in the air.

Shortly after arriving at the conference, I heard someone call my name. I turned around, and there was Laura, the woman who had beat me out of the job in Paris. She had come to Minneapolis for the same conference.

What an opportunity! I was dying to hear about her magical life in the City of Light. I knew I’d be green with envy but I was so curious to learn what my own life could have been like. So we met up between sessions, and she laid it all out for me: she hated her job; Paris was so expensive that she had to live at the end of some metro line; she was not living the dream. In fact, did I know of any openings at the company where I worked?

What a gift. Now, that’s not to say that I would have hated the job and would have chosen to live in some dodgy quartier of Paris. But life had dealt me a hand that was hard to beat: I worked for one of the most successful companies in the world; I was making friends right and left; I had a beautiful home that suited me to a T. And when I vacation in Paris, I stay in one of the chic arrondissements within walking distance of everything I want to do.

So to come back full circle, I’m not in a rush to investigate a crime or embark on a road that might not be to my liking in the end. I have faith that when the time is right, a window will open and I’ll be shown the darker side of life as a P.I. (many of my former classmates are now friends I keep in touch with). Or maybe I’ll find an immensely satisfying way to marry my interests in a way that wouldn’t be possible without a background in tech, a passion for writing mystery novels, and my newly acquired skills as an investigator.

And when that happens, it’ll be something worth throwing my beret in the air about.

Thanks this week go to Ingrid Thoft, who drew my name out of a bucket and made me the lucky winner of a book raffle, and ultimately helped make me a private investigator too.