By the banks of the Big Muddy: Bouchercon 2011

by Jonathan Hayes

Warning: This post contains a somewhat whimsical graphic of an active penis.

Here’s some simple advice: when you live in the Greatest City on Earth, never leave it.

Never go on vacation. Never fly somewhere to meet someone you met on the Internet, no matter how incredibly hot they are. Refuse all invitations to weddings and funerals. If you get the urge to leave, lie down and order Chinese for delivery.

The honest truth is that no good can ever come of leaving the earthly Eden that is the island of Manhattan.

However. If you absolutely must leave the island, the annual Bouchercon crime fiction festival is a fantastic reason to go. What's not to love? A couple thousand bloodthirsty readers, writers, agents and publishers marooned in the middle of an unfamiliar city is a surefire recipe for hilarity. Oh, the days start off innocently enough – friends hugging, a Who’s Who of international crime fiction doing panels and interviews, hilariously awkward authors having “casual chats” with fans, that sort of thing. But after dark, the event transforms into something dark and glittering - if you’ve seen the grainy snapshots and Paris Hilton nightvision-style cellphone videos taken in the hotel bars starting around 2 AM, you’ll know what I mean. Really, this conference should be called Debauchercon. 

I’m sitting in St. Louis Airport, on my way home after B’con11. O St. Louis, City on the banks of the mighty Big Muddy! How you have abused me! It wasn’t the conference – Bouchercon was as great as ever. It wasn’t your citizens, charming and polite to a tee. It wasn’t the packed hordes of fundamentalist Christians in my hotel, surging through the halls and elevators of my hotel in a tsunami of sensible clothing and “Love Life” badges (even though my neighbors did insist on rising at the crack of dawn - every. freakin’. day). Your streets are handsome, your Downtown has some of the best-looking old skyscrapers and covetable factory spaces I’ve ever seen.

It’s your food. And I know that you can’t judge a city’s food by its Convention District fare – if you visit NYC, and eat only in the Times Square/42^nd Street area, you’d probably eat pretty poorly too. But by God I had some appalling swill here!

The gold standard seemed to be the sort of cuisine generally served heaped on platters in front of the TV on Game Night: battered, fried to a crisp, dipped into Ranch dressing mix blended with mayonnaise and blue cheese. Never before have I seen such liberties taken with produce – hey, chef who came up with“Fire-roasted artichoke hearts, served with sweet chili sauce and chipotle sauce”? They’re putting together a tribunal in the Hague to investigate your kitchen crimes.

What’s so frustrating about this was that there’s clearly good food to be had. The town lies on a river in the middle of fertile plains, surrounded by vegetables and some of the country’s best pigs. There’s no need for everything to be a variation on Buffalo chicken wings – that’s what Buffalo’s for!

The wrongness of this state of affairs was proved by dinner at Niche, where the food was so good I almost wept. The maple custard with roasted chopped porcini mushrooms and a dashi “caviar” was one of the few validations of this whole vogue for making little membrane-clad spheres of liquid, and the Jonah crab appetizer (crabmeat, flaked pink grapefruit, shiso leaf, mint, avocado panna cotta and shards of cocoa glass) was revelatory. The ingredients are there, and the cooks are there, too – Niche chef Gerard Craft has said that there’s a thriving food culture there, with serious cooks and fantastic food blogs; given the culinary wasteland that was downtown, I’m sure he’s right, since people here must be forced to fend for themselves.

Gerard Craft of Niche:

Of course, I’m exaggerating wildly (not about Niche, though, which is excellent), but, still: too often the food across this great land of ours looks right, but is miles away from tasting anywhere near decent. The word “fusion” has been used to justify some of the worst atrocities of this young century; if you don’t know how exotic flavours go together, why not work with the flavours you do know? There’s nothing wrong with American food – and so much right with American produce! Or buy a copy of Dornenburg and Page’s excellent Culinary Artistry, which clearly outlines which foods go well together, and (just as importantly) which are in season at any given moment.

Anyway, Bouchercon.

Bouchercon is always a fantastic conference – tightly plotted and elegantly executed. I spent quite a lot of time hanging out with Chevy Stevens, who is as wonderful as she is Canadian. It was her first B’con, my third, but we agreed: for authors, at some level, it’s a bit like high school. There are all sorts of competing hierarchies, some based on obvious metrics (book sales and fame, mostly), others on less readily quantifiable criteria (coolness, edginess, connectedness, attractiveness). The bar where the authors gather is like a lava lamp of cliques, clots of friends and colleagues forming, gradually budding off other little blobs which then merge to form new, bigger blobs.

I don’t mean to imply that it’s ruthless or exclusive – on the contrary, it’s actually a pretty friendly bunch, particularly if you can prove your worth. And even if you can’t, most of the authors I know are pretty good about supporting newer writers.

But there’s a very clear sense of who’s made it and who hasn’t, and all sorts of confident assertions of advances and sales and print runs for this guy’s or that gal’s books. The talk is often fairly gloomy these days, with authors worrying about declining advances and print sales, and how to negotiate the ebook market. This is one of the reasons it’s kind of nice to hang out with the best-selling crowd, for whom life seems to be an endless series of expenses-paid readings in Amsterdam, Rome and Mumbai, options moving quickly into production, or how a new Twi translation means that their sleuth can finally reach the Akan people of Southern Ghana.

I was on three panels. The first was a forensics panel, with Jan Burke, Marcia Clarke, Stefanie Pintoff and Doug Starr, ably chaired by Leslie Budewitz. There was a decent crowd, and the discussion was vivid and spritely, with Marcia talking about how hard she had to push to get blood on OJ’s socks tested for DNA, and me trying delicately to explain that the OJ Simpson trial was one of the best things to happen to forensic science in the last century, since it caused us to radically tighten procedures for obtaining, securing and storing forensic evidence.

The music panel – Mark Billingham, Roger Ellory, Brian Glimer, me and Rochelle Staab, with Wallace Stroby cracking the whip – was altogether more rollicking. An enjoyable portion of the session was spent dissing the music of Phil Collins, and, eventually, Paul McCartney, comme il faut. Actually, the Macca stuff wasn’t so much a diss of the music (anyone who hates Band on Run is a bad person) as a diss of the man himself. There was music love aplenty, and some feisty Brit-on-Brit badinage (between Mark, Roger and myself, there were enough Englishmen to start shifting that Boston Harbor tea back up into the boat), but at the end of the day, it was a bunch of middle-aged white people sitting around talking about music, which only gets you so far before the nostalgia begins to clot thick and lumpy.

The next day I signed with Joe Finder at the Crimespree booth. The wonderful Denise Hamilton, celebrated noir author and LA Times perfume columnist stopped by with perfume samples, at which point I learned that Joe, too, is a scent aficionado – he’s even friends with Luca Turin, the brilliant sense scientist and perfume critic, a personal hero.

Some weeks back, Denise had introduced me to the Perfumed Court, a kind of samizdat distributor of perfume samples and decants. I try consciously to develop my sense of smell – something I’ve done since my food writing days; my interest is mostly in smelling things analytically, rather than in perfume. I collect essential oils, but my attempts at perfumery have mostly served to remind me how gifted real perfumers are (like the amazing Swiss parfumier Andy Tauer – if you can, try and find his L’Art du Désert Marocain, a heady exotic, warm with coriander, rock rose, jasmine and cedar).

I went a bit wild at the Perfumed Court, buying about 20 different samples, of which the most interesting was Sécretions Magnifiques. A succes de scandale from the punkish French perfume house l’État Libre d’Orange, SM is inspired by bodily secretions – breast milk, blood, semen. Denise had pronounced it “unwearable”, so I ordered it immediately. But the sample I’d received wasn’t at all offensive - it was powdery and dry, and smelled quite nice when my friend Jill modeled it for an evening. So I’d asked Denise to bring some of her official sample to B’con just to make sure I’d got the right thing.

Sitting at the booth, chatting with Joe and the occasional passerby, all was fine and dandy. Denise arrived with her little sack of product, and I wasted no time dousing myself liberally with the magnificent secretions. Both arms.

And that was when my troubles began.

Within seconds, notes of half-cleaned fish bones, curdling milk and blood-spattered abattoir floor swum around me, underneath them a dank plateau of metal, stale sweat and flesh fold grime. I was near-gagging as the smell intensified; it occurred to me that the perfume was a synthetic, and that it would be impossible to scrub off. I leapt to my feet and lurched through the hallways to the men’s room, spent 10 minutes washing and soaping and scrubbing, my arms shocked pink, my head spinning with nausea as I tried to sluice the vile syrup from my skin.

It may have been post-traumatic stress, but for the rest of the day I kept getting Magnificent Secretions flashbacks.

Nonetheless, the afternoon was fun. Maddee James, who designs web pages for many in the mystery community, gathered writers up for a game. The audience was small, but select, including power book bloggers Erin Mitchell of In Real Life, and Chantelle Aimée Osman of Sirens of Suspense. Let’s see: Brett Battles, me, Will Lavender, Boyd Morrison, Stefanie Pintoff and Eric Stone all played this game where Maddee gave us a book title and author eg James Lee Burke’s Rain Gods. We each had to write what we thought would be the first line. All the first lines – including Burke’s original – were read to the audience, who had to guess which was the real one.

It sounds a little involved, but it was actually pretty simple, and really hilarious, mostly because the participants were so funny. My favourite line was Eric’s, for Rain Gods, in fact. It wasn’t the entire sentence so much as his creation of the phrase “displaced Vietnamese shrimper woman” that just killed me…

After that, my panel obligations were done, so I hung out and schmoozed, in the tremendously inept way in which I “schmooze”. I spent a lot of time saying hi to people, including finally meeting David Corbett and JT Ellison and Zoe Sharpe, among the Murderati. I hung out with old friends, made some new ones and caught a few panels. There were so many great authors there, but I’m trying to work on my new book, so I limited myself to buying just three books, picking up Will Lavender’s Obedience, and John Rector’s The Grove and The Cold Kiss. And I have a list of other people I want to read. We’ll see.

Anyway, all in all it was a great Bouchercon. 

And in truth, I even enjoyed the bad food. Something one of my old girlfriends never quite understood was that an appalling meal is much more satisfying than a mediocre meal, since then you get to really tear it apart.

Anyway! Another sprawling post from me. David Corbett, if you’ve made it this far, I owe you another drink. I was ready to pay out in St. Louis, but you were all over the place! Next time, buddy.

Anyone else have any Bouchercon reminiscences they'd care to share with the class?

SO NOT HOLLYWOOD

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

What impressed me more than anything about Bouchercon was the warm reception I received from a community of authors who had no doggone reason to be so damn warm and accepting.  But there they were, the top mystery-thriller writers of our day, opening their arms to one and all.

I only knew a few of these folks when I arrived, but I left knowing most everyone.  Because that was their way. 

At Bouchercon you walk into the hotel lobby to find yourself swallowed into the bar scene where those you know introduce you to those you’ve only read or heard about.  I arrived nervous, wondering who I might know, wondering if I would be accepted into a group whose members had paid their dues and earned the right to be there.

I stepped into that bar to encounter Alex/Brett/Cornelia/JT/James Scott Bell/Alan Jacobson/F. Paul Wilson/Christa Faust/Marcus Sakey/Sean Chercover/Lee Child/Rebecca Cantrell/Bobby McCue/Rebecca Cantrell/John Gilstrap/Matt Hilton/Naomi Hirahara/Jason Pinter/Howard Shrier/Kelli Stanley…you get the picture.

And everyone, every single one of them sang the praises of every other one of them, shared the stories of their successes and failures, shared the little tidbits of advice that had been shared with them by others or had been learned through their own hard luck efforts.  And they listened to the stories of my successes and failures, nodding their heads, patting my shoulder occasionally, smiling or showing concern when appropriate. 

Someone always arrived to take my hand, to guide me to someone they wanted me to meet.  To someone influential, someone that might advance my career.  Not a single author hoarded this information.  They passed me eagerly, from hand to hand.  As they did with everyone.  I was not singled out.  I was not the exception. 

And the readers, and the fans, and the writers-yet-to-be-published were welcomed as well.  In the same fashion.  Everyone had access to everyone else, and everyone respected the boundaries of others.

A special treat for me was meeting some of the readers of our Murderati blog site.  The warmth I felt when people like Allison introduced herself, reminding me of some of the things we’ve shared in past blogs, allowing me to get a glimpse into her world as a writer and lawyer in San Francisco.  I can’t count how many times someone came up to me to say they read my posts on Murderati and that they had hoped to meet me at Bouchercon.  The thing I wrote most commonly when signing my book was, “Thanks for your enthusiasm and warm smile.”  Because everyone I met was enthusiastic, everyone had a warm smile. 

“You sound like you’re at camp,” my wife said as I rat-a-tat described the events of my days.

“Camp, yes…”  It was exactly like camp, without the tents and bugs and campfires and bad food.  The camaraderie was the same.  The silliness was there also, like the drunken 3:30 a.m. bar songs in the lobby of the Hyatt with shouts of “Shut the fuck up!” from a room somewhere around the tenth floor.  Or Alexandra Sokoloff, Joe Konrath and others waltzing through the lobby in their bathing suits on the way to the hot tub, carrying a tray filled with beer.  The security guys stopping by once in a while to tell them not to drown, saying that they didn’t mind at all so long as the bathers kept the riff-raff from other hotels from invading the pool (not knowing, of course, that none in Alex’s party had a room at the Hyatt).

Each day was more exciting than the last.  The things I loved the most:  Brett Battles receiving the Barry Award for Best Thriller of 2008; his inviting me to share the celebratory dinner with just him and his editor; the phone call I received from my publicist to tell me that, after only four weeks in release, I had landed on the L.A. Times Bestseller List; the wonderful review I received in the L.A. Times the next day; the crowd that attended my panel; watching my books disappear off the bookstore shelves; the friends I met for the first time; the hugs and handshakes at the end.

I realized how unlike Hollywood was the Bouchercon experience.  The world of Bouchercon = “Come on in, there’s always room for another author!”  The world of Hollywood = “Fuck you get out of my way who the hell let you in to begin with?”

Hollywood is a tough place to hang your hat.  Everything devolves into Social Darwinism where the strongest, fittest, most predatory players find great success.  There are always exceptions to the rule, of course, and I’ve met a few talented, successful screenwriters who are accepting of others.  But I haven’t met many happy screenwriters.  Film is a director’s medium, so what the screenwriter ends up doing is writing a blueprint for the director’s vision.  That’s great if the screenwriter is directing the film.  However, that’s not generally the case.

At Bouchercon I met a whole lot of happy authors.  Sure, not a lot of Ferrari owners in the crowd, but at least we authors get “final cut.”  Our vision stands on the page.  And, while we’re all generally a bundle of insecurities, at least our insecurities don’t manifest into arrogant behavior that isolates us from the one, true support group we can enjoy—our peers. 

The authors in our genre, the authors I met at Bouchercon, understand this.  We are a support group.  It’s hard enough just to get published.  We don’t need to compete with ourselves.

So, is it a wonder I fell into a minor depression the minute the conference closed?  How can anyone go back to his day job after that?  How can anyone face the daunting creditors?  Bouchercon gave me a glimpse of what life could be, if only I could live it 24/7. 

The depression coincided with another event—the passing of my grandmother, who was 103 years old.  She died ONE DAY before her 104^th birthday.  I had visited her just last week, after four years away, when I traveled to Denver on my book tour.  She was fine and healthy and full of humor.  She had another twenty years in her for sure.  Then one little bladder infection and it was all over.  She died Saturday morning, as my mom was flying in for her birthday.  My mom waited until Sunday afternoon to tell me because she didn’t want to ruin my time at Bouchercon.

Life and death, ecstasy and grief.  I experienced it all over the course of one weekend.  Thankfully, I had a great support group to share it with.

AT PLAY IN THE FIELD OF THE WRITTEN WORD PART 2

by Brett Battles

When we last left off after part 1, I was finishing my proposal and about to send it to my agent. If you recall, I mentioned that I was doing something different that neither my agent nor my editor was expecting.

Now I can tell you what I did…instead of giving them a single, stand alone book proposal, I gave them three completely different ones.

Yes, I said three…individual…story proposals.

Each included the following: A) a ten to fifteen page outline, and B) sample chapters of around thirty pages for each idea.

I know. You’re thinking, What? Are you crazy?

Perhaps. After all, I turned in approximately 120 pages of written material…for a  proposal!

(Wait. I am crazy.)

Here’s how it happened. Earlier this year I was at a point with the book I was working on that I had a break of a few days, and, as luck would have it, an idea for a stand alone came to me. In a two or three day period I typed up nearly forty pages of the beginning of the book. Then I saved the file (we’ll call this idea #1), and went back to the manuscript I was working on.

When August came around, my publisher and I agreed that the next proposal should be for a stand alone instead of the fifth in the Quinn series. Almost immediately I had a new idea (idea #2) that I was excited about. I worked on it for several weeks, spending a lot of time just thinking things through. I ended up devoting a lot of time on the trip I took in late August working on it, and had things pretty much had it all figured out by the time I got on the plane to fly home.

Funny thing about flying, often I’m struck with random ideas that momentarily consume me. (Many times they involved planes, for obvious reasons. One such idea occurred on my trip to Bouchercon last week.) This moment of inspiration happened to me on the first leg of my journey back to the States, and for three hours I wrote long hand in my notebook the first couple chapters of a new book (you got it, idea #3). When I got home I still had a few weeks before my proposal was due, so I allowed myself some time to flesh out this new idea and see if it was worth sending in. I’m sure my initial thought was that if it was better than idea #2, it would be the proposal I’d submit.

As I continued on it, I definitely liked where it was going, but I also found that I still really liked idea #2. That’s when the scandalous thought hit me: why not send in both and let my publisher decided.

And seconds after that thought crossed my mind I remembered the story from earlier in the year.

Knowing I probably shouldn’t, I went back and reread it anyway. Damn if I didn’t liked where it was going.

Okay, fine, I told myself. I’ll send them three. Because I knew I’d be happy to write any of them. Let my editor weight in on which one should be next.

As a side note, I should say that this method of giving multiple choices was also ingrained in me during my working days in television graphics. The thing was, if someone wanted a main title for their show…let’s say TRUE HOLLYWOOD STORIES (one of the shows on E! I rebranded)…if you show them one idea they won’t like it. But if you give them choices, they’ll feel like you really put thought into it, and will pick one.

In the case of my proposal, reason behind given multiple ideas didn’t equate to my time at E!, but my thinking was definitely influenced by my process there. The real reason I sent all three was because I was happy with all of them so it didn’t really matter to me which one I did.

The last Friday of September, I emailed the proposal to my agent without any warning about what she would receive. Was she impressed? She sounded like it to me. That following Monday, she send it on to my editor.

Since my proposal was rather bulky, and my editor also had other things on her plate, it took a couple weeks for her to get back to me. She finally did the Friday after my last Murderati post (two weeks ago tomorrow.) Thankfully, she was very happy with all the material, and while she liked aspects of all three idea, she went with idea #2.

(Funny tangent…the down side of doing this (besides all the extra work) was that once I sent the proposal in, one of the ideas started to pick at my mind. And since I had nothing else to do, I put in a little time on it, developing it further. And, you guessed it, that wasn’t the one chosen. Oh well, it’ll be the next one if I have any say in it!)

So I’m back at the daily writing thing now, working on making idea #2 into a finished, kickass stand alone. I’m pretty excited about it, too, because I’m using a lot of my personal past in it…(the book is largely set in my hometown.)

Now, would I advise doing your proposal in the manner I did? Ah…no. What works for one person, doesn’t necessarily work for all. I will say I don’t plan on doing multiple ideas for future submissions, though, I guess, you never know.

Questions for today:

Brett…crazy/not crazy? (Perhaps we should skip that one.)

For writers, how much thinking to you put in before you start a new book? (Not talking necessarily about outlining, just working the idea and characters in your mind.)

Readers, does this behind-the-curtain stuff even interest you?

And finally…and this is most important…I would love to hear any ideas on topics you like me, or other Murderati contributors, to discuss!

A special hello to all the new friends I met at Bouchercon, and to the old ones I got to spend time with and get to know better. It was an excellent conference and I can hardly wait until next year. If you weren’t there, try to come next time. Hell, it’s in San Francisco! Who’d want to miss that?

 

Empty

JT Ellison

There are times when nothing comes.

No words. No ideas. Nothing.

This is one of those times.

After four years of blogging, I’ve simply run out of things to say.

But that’s not a choice I can make. Even when there’s nothing floating around in my brain, no pithy comments, no stellar advice, no embarrassing moments to share, I have to write my blog. It’s a commitment I’ve made to you, the reader, to my blog mates, and ultimately, to myself.

So.

I will force the words onto the page, and hope for the best.

Thankfully, I’m not having this problem with the books. Books are fine. Books are groovy. The ideas are flowing non-stop, and so are the words. I’m at that awkward time of year that I’m writing a new book and editing a forthcoming title, which is always hard. It happens every time I’m just getting my legs under me with a story, boom – I have to all stop and go focus on the one prior. This is good and bad.

For starters, I am writing a series, which means the characters, their foibles and triumphs, all build from book to book. It makes life easy because the world is already built, the characters, for the most part, are the same, and I can simply insert them into a new case. But now that I’m six books in, changes are happening. Characters lives are altered.

One of the tricks I was using is coming back to bite me in the ass – setting each book seasonally instead of annually. As a matter of fact, book five begins within a couple of weeks of book four, and book six starts literally a few days after the end of book five. The fifth book takes place over three days. So that’s a lot of Taylor’s world sandwiched into a very short period of time. How much can a character change in three days?

Well, the obvious answer is as much as I want her to. But I’ve always tried to avoid major changes in her life – she is who she is, and if I’m writing her correctly, her reactions are going to be consistent regardless of circumstance. Consistent, in my mind, is good. But is consistent good for the character, the series, the stories?

I guess I don’t have anything to blog about because I am so involved in the decision making process of these two books that it’s taking all of my mental energy.

And of course, now that I’m forcing myself to type, it seems I have a topic after all.

Remember the old tongue twister: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

That’s kind of where I am with my girl. How much change can she sustain and still stay true to her nature? What kind of change is good, and builds the character? What kind of change is too much to handle? If I want to keep moving her story forward, she’s going to have to change, and change significantly.

Meh. I am starting to understand how shortsighted I was way back when I started writing these books. An iconic character is a noble goal, but no matter what you do, they have to change or the series becomes stagnant.

Let’s use our venerable favorite, Jack Reacher, as an example.

In my mind, Reacher is the ultimate series character. He is iconic in every sense of the word. He is a hero. He is consistent. You know what you’re going to get when you pick up a book by Lee Child.

But Reacher is far from predictable, and therein lies the true majesty of an iconic character. One who can alter subtly instead of “CHANGING” is the goal I had in mind. He even tries to change himself, but always ends up back where he started.

John Connolly’s Charlie Parker is another example I draw from when thinking of excellent series character. Parker does change, appreciably, but that change is a dynamic reaction to his circumstance in the opening book, and the rest of his changing is that subtle altering over the course of the series that Reacher does. Every time Parker tries to change, he ends up ruining things, so it’s easier to stay the same. (I’m simplifying this a wee bit, but remember, I’m struggling for cogent thought today, so bear with me.)

Well. I’ve now given myself a lot to think about.

How about you? How do you feel about series characters, and their evolution over time? Do you like drastic change, or something less appreciable? Any examples you could toss into the mix to help me think this through would be great appreciated!

(I’m at Bouchercon this weekend, so forgive me if I’m a bit lackadaisical. I’ll try to get to everyone over the course of the day.)

Wine of the Week: 2008 Tormaresca Neprica Puglia 

Turning 40 and Missing Bouchercon

by Alafair Burke

This Friday is October 16, significant to many people, I’m sure, for a variety of reasons.  Odds being what they are, someone reading this is probably having an anniversary.  Or a birthday.  Or a new book published.

According to the handy dandy Interwebs, this Friday will mark a number of important historical events: the guillotining of Marie Antoinette in 1793, the births of Oscar Wilde and Eugene O’Neill, n 1854 and 1888, respectively, the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and the launch of Ross Perot's infomercial in 1992.

But I have my eye on this Friday for two reasons.  First, it’s the Friday of Bouchercon weekend.   There’s no shortage of terrific programming for the weekend, and Friday is chock full of good stuff:   2009 Anthony nominees for short story, like Sean Chercover and Jane Cleland, discuss their work; panels on setting, plotting, and noir (oh my!); talk of police procedurals, PI novels, series characters, and women in the genre; and, of course, Michael Koryta’s interview of guest of honor (and god of writing) Michael Connelly.

 So much for a photo with both Michaels at the same time

I think I just felt a tear roll down my right cheek.  Why?  Because I won’t be in Indianapolis.  Nope, no Bouchercon for me this year.  Why not?  Because the second reason I’ve been eyeballing the approach of October 16, 2009, is that it marks the fortieth anniversary of my birth.  I believe that makes it my fortieth birthday.

When I first realized last winter that Bouchercon fell on my birthday, I assumed I’d go.  Given the timing of the annual conference, I’ve had Bouchercon birthdays before.  I spent my 33rd at that memorable hotel in Las Vegas.  My editor took me off-site to see Tom Jones where I was not the only birthday girl, but was apparently the only one who held on to her lingerie.

But as early 2009 whizzed by and my travel plans went left unmade, I realized I was procrastinating for a reason.  I was trying to guess how I’d feel on the big day.  I was imagining my own future state of mind.  Stupid idea.  Speculating about the future is risky.  Understanding one’s current mood and its relationship to external factors is also imprecise.  Throwing the two together was…well, stupid.

Several months ago, past-me imagined future-me on October 16, 2009, and did not like what she saw:  Me wandering around alone at Bouchercon; sitting at my signing table, saying goodbye to the last person in my modest line as the crowd waiting to see the author next to me tried to mask its pity; sobbing into my martini at the bar as I realized I was officially half way to eighty, well over a third of the way to dead.

Bummer, huh?

Turns out past-me sucks at both remembering the past and predicting the future. 

As Bouchercon approaches, I find myself recalling not those past moments of humble pie (almost) every rookie writer experiences at Bouchercon -- meandering around with a hotel map and a conference brochure as the seasoned vets exchange enthusiastic and kissy welcomes and hold court at the bar.  Instead, my mind is flooded with good memories of friendships formed and a love of writing shared: the Reacher Creature parties; that amazing panel in 2006 with Ken Bruen, Laura Lippman, and fellow Ratis, Cornelia Read and Zoe Sharp; the night these guys became my pals and we smiled like people in a toothpaste ad:

Bouchercon Chicago with Ben Rehder, James Born, and Barry Eisler And, although October 16 is still a few days off, it looks like past-me also got the future wrong. I don’t feel like crap about 40 after all.  I have an amazing husband and two kickass jobs.  I get love from good friends and my awesome dog.  I ran twenty-five miles last week, which I couldn’t do when I was 30.  Or 20.  And I live (and get to write about) the coolest city in the world.

If I cried at the Bouchercon bar about entering a fifth decade of this life I've got, I’d deserve to get my butt kicked.

Yet for reasons I had months ago, I won’t be in Indianapolis.  I’ll be having a different kind of fun: that husband and a few of the good friends I mentioned will be hanging out at a beach house, frying a turkey.  Today’s me predicts Friday-me will have a fabulous time.

But I’ll miss you folks who are going to Bouchercon.  I hope you’ll use the comments to remember the past or predict the future.  What are some of your favorite Bouchercon memories or most anticipated Bouchercon events?  Feel free to throw in some birthday chat as well.  You never know…Friday-me might need the encouragement after all.