Ask.

by Alexandra Sokoloff

I am not at Left Coast Crime this weekend, even though it would have been a no-brainer, L.A. and all.   

There was a time – like, yesterday – I would never have missed a conference.   Conferences are the social reward of being an author, cleverly disguised as essential career business.   I love them.   They are always exactly what I need in the moment.

But tempting as it is, and much as I am missing everyone, I don’t regret it.   I don’t want to take even a few days away from my writing right now.   More than that, I don’t want to pull myself out of writing mode, and conference mode is really different from writing mode. 

It’s been an exceptionally hard year for me, as it has for so many of the ‘Rati, and I think for many, many, many of our extended community.   And the whole rest of the world.

So I don’t have a lot of energy to split my focus, right now.   And I am so excited and grateful to HAVE a book I want to write again.

I tried this whole thing a little differently this time.    I always wait for inspiration to help me choose a project.    Well, “waiting” isn’t exactly the word, because it’s a more active process than that, deliberately throwing myself open to receive ideas, journaling, making lists as I’ve talked about before, foraging widely in subject matter that draws me.  

But this year I’ve been working a 12-step recovery program, Al Anon, for people who have been affected by other people’s drinking (which would be, let’s face it, everyone, right?).  One of the pillars of that program is releasing your own need to control everything under the sun and learning to first trust, and then gradually fully rely on a Higher Power of your own understanding.  (And for the record, the first thing I do when I buy one of the daily meditation books or any other of the literature, is go through and cross out any mentions of “He” in regard to a Higher Power.  Or add my own genders randomly.)

So this time, as I was finishing  Shifters, my Harlequin Nocturne book that comes out in October, and getting that gnawing restless feeling…   What next?   What am I going to write next?   I realized that if I am really committed to this spiritual path, this decision is like every other in my life – I needed to turn it over to my Higher Power.   And ask:   “What do YOU want me to write?”

(How you phrase the question in these communications is important, I’ve found.   It’s not “What should I write next?”    but “What would you have me write?”)

So every day, I’ve been asking, in prayer, meditation, in the car, lying awake at night – “What do YOU want me to write?

This question had actually become more and more desperate, especially once I’d finished the first draft of the current book.   Because I didn’t seem to be getting any answers.  

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been a professional writer for most of my adult life and I actually have a backlog of perfectly great, pretty developed story ideas that would take me much more than the rest of my lifetime to write.    But that isn’t the point.   I don’t want to be out there on my own writing, any more.   I want to be aligned with what the Universe wants from me.

But with no obvious answers forthcoming, I went into doubt.  I started to feel not just confused, but completely blocked about what book to write next.    I started obsessing about the need to give my agent some proposals (like, yesterday).   And I worked on ideas, carded them, did all the right things – all the while being less and less trusting of myself to make the right decision.    So over and over and OVER every day, for weeks, maybe months, I kept asking (in prayer, meditation, in the car, lying awake at night) – “What do YOU want me to write?”  “PLEASE tell me what to write.”    “I really NEED to know what to write, here…”

Then, week before last, I had the opportunity to go on retreat with some of my best writer friends.  

I’ve written about this before, my posse of mystery writer friends (I should say goddesses, really) I hang out with in Raleigh: Margaret Maron, Sarah Shaber, Diane Chamberlain, Katy Munger, Mary Kay Andrews and Brynn Bonner.   I was stunned when they asked me to join this group – my first book had just come out and I felt like such an amateur, comparatively.    I’d been reading Margaret for years and it was really like getting an invitation from the queen. 

We’re more a regular lunch group than a critique group, but several times a year we go on retreat to the beach or the mountains or some generally fantastic place – that’s how I came to stay in the haunted mansion in Southern Pines that I used for the model of my haunted house in THE UNSEEN. We get together in the morning to set goals for the day and help each other with story problems, work all day long by ourselves and then convene at night to have dinner and brainstorm on any new problem that anyone’s having.   And of course there are walks on the beach, field trips to cemeteries and nearby historical districts….

This trip we went to Mary Kay’s beach cottage on Tybee Island, off the Georgia coast near Savannah, which is the same charming, funky cottage she wrote about in her book SAVANNAH BREEZE.  Photos here.   And I almost didn’t go because there is so much else in turmoil in my life, but then I thought, no, “I will go, and I will come back with my story.   I have to.”

So we’re down at the beach, and a few days go by and I am still floundering, although it feels a lot better to flounder at the beach, somehow.   But on the third day, at our breakfast session, I was telling everyone all about my several story ideas, and I swear, Mary Kay just channeled God.   She got really intense, scary intense, and asked me bluntly, over and over again,   “What do you WANT this book to be?    What do you want it to do for you?   You have to ask for what you WANT.”  

Which is, always, the hardest thing for me to do.

And I opened my mouth and started telling them about a third book that I hadn’t even told them about because I hadn’t even figured out how to do it yet, and as I was telling them about it I was realizing that I have been, for weeks, getting the most clear signs about this book.  EVERYTHING, everywhere.    For every time I have asked this question the answer has been right in my face, in my inbox, on my shelves, appliquéd on the clothes I wear every day, in songs I hear, all right in my face.  

But I still hadn’t gotten it, so the Universe finally took pity on me and gave me the most direct answer to my question I could possibly have asked for, unambiguous, unequivocal.

So I am here today to say,  “Ask”.    Whatever it is.   Ask and wait for the answer.   The Universe is so patient, and so wants you to get whatever it is you need, that it will stay right there with you through pain and confusion and doubt and turmoil until you are ready to hear the answers you need.

I would love to know, today, if and how any of you consult with the universe or your own higher powers, in whatever areas of your life you do.

And of course, reports from LCC from all those attending!

- Alex



Back at the manor

by Alexandra Sokoloff

I have a posse of mystery writer friends (I should say goddesses or divas!) I hang with when I’m in Raleigh: Margaret Maron, Sarah Shaber, Diane Chamberlain, Katy Munger, Mary Kay Andrews and Brynn Bonner.   We’re more a regular lunch group than a critique group, but several times a year we go on retreat to the beach or the mountains or some generally fantastic place.   We work all day long by ourselves and then convene at night to drink wine and brainstorm on any problem that any one of us is having (and of course, compare page counts!).

And one of our favorite retreats is the Artist in Residence program at the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines, NC.  

Weymouth is an amazing place – a 9000 sq. foot mansion on 1200 acres (including several formal gardens and a 9-hole golf course) that’s really three houses melded together. It was what they called a “Yankee Playtime Plantation” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the fox hunting lodge of coal magnate James Boyd.  James Boyd’s grandson James rebelled against the family business to become - what else? - a novelist. Boyd wrote historical novels, and his editor was the great Maxwell Perkins (“Editor of Genius”), and in the 1920’s and 30’s Weymouth became a Southern party venue for the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Thomas Wolfe. That literary aura pervades the house, especially the library, with all its photos and portraits of the writers who have stayed at the house.

It’s a fantastic place to write – pages just fly.  

We have our own rooms, meet for coffee in the morning and set goals for the day, work all day, and then reconvene at night for dinner and to discuss progress and spitball plot problems.

When I started plotting THE UNSEEN, I needed a haunted mansion that I could know and convey intimately, so of course the Weymouth mansion, with its rich and strange history, convoluted architecture,  isolation, vast grounds, and haunted reputation, was a no-brainer.    I truly believe that when you commit to a story, the Universe opens all kinds of opportunities to you.    And as it happened, we were able to stay in the house again for a week as I was writing the book last year

We came down to the house on the very day that my characters were moving into THEIR haunted house.

(I’m telling you, writing is a little scary.   More than a little scary, in this case…)

Now, some of us had some truly spooky encounters in that place.   Every time I turned around there was knocking on the walls (the pipes in the kitchen), weird manifestations (a ghostly team of horses trotting by with a buggy on the road outside) and rooms that were just too creepy to go into after dark.  One night I had to go all the way back upstairs, across the upstairs hall and around to the front stairs to get to a room I wanted to go to because I was too freaked out to cross the Great Room in the dark.   And another one of us had the classic “Night Hag” visitation:  she woke up feeling that someone or something was sitting on her chest.    Brrrrr…..

One prevalent theory of hauntings is that a haunting is an imprint of a violent or strong emotion that lingers in a place like an echo or recording.   I’ve always liked that explanation.

Well, this house was imprinted, all right, but far beyond what I had expected.

Because besides the requisite spooky things… that house was downright sexy.  There’s no other way to say it.   Seriously - hot.

I had ridiculously, I mean – embarrassingly -  erotic dreams every night.  There were rooms I walked into that made my knees go completely weak.   The house, the gardens, even the golf course, just vibrated with sex.

Now, maybe that was just the imprint of creativity – the whole mansion is constantly inhabited by writers and musicians, and as we all know, creativity is a turn-on.  

But also, consider the history.   As I said – Weymouth was a “Yankee Playtime Plantation”.   Rich people used that house specifically to party - in the Roaring Twenties, no less.   (Think THE GREAT GATSBY!).   God only knows how many trysts, even orgies, went on.   So could sex imprint on a place, just as violence or trauma is supposed to be able to imprint?

It makes sense to me.

And the history continues today -  the mansion and gardens are constantly used for weddings, loading more sexual energy into the place, and last night, for example, there was a junior high cotillion practice in the great room, which I snuck down to watch – talk about sexual energy bouncing off the walls!

That sexual dynamic surprised the hell out of me, but it completely worked with my main character’s back story - she’s a young California psychology professor who impulsively flees to North Carolina after she catches her fiancé cheating on her.  (Actually, she dreams her fiancé is cheating on her, in exactly the scenario that she catches him in later.)    So her wound is a specifically sexual one, and one of her great weaknesses is that she’s vulnerable to being sexually manipulated.  

Add to that that the most prevalent explanation of a poltergeist is that it’s hormones run amok:  that the projected sexual energy of an adolescent or young adult can randomly cause objects to move or break.

So of course I went with it.   It wasn’t anything to do with my outline, but California girl that I am, how can I not go with the obvious flow?

I think it adds a great dimension to the story, in a way I never could have anticipated, and I’m pleased to have been true to the - um, spirit - of poltergeists.

And this year, one of the books I’m working on at the manor is my dark paranormal for Harlequin Nocturne, about a witch and a shapeshifter.   Shapeshifter erotica – in THIS house – well, you can imagine…

So I have two questions, first, re: research.    Has a place you’ve researched ever significantly changed a story for you?    How?

But also I’d love to know – what’s the sexiest place you’ve ever been, and why?    I wouldn’t mind having a list to file away.   You never know when you might need it.

-        Alex

And here's a bit of the introduction to the house, from The Unseen:

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……..They had turned off the narrow road and onto a dirt one that led up to the stone gateposts from the photos.     Laurel felt a little buzz of déjà vu at the sight of the sleek stone hunting dogs seated atop them, permanently frozen at attention.

            A metal gate stretched between the posts, padlocked.   Audra reached for the keys  on the dash, and Brendan gallantly jumped out to unlock and open the gate for her.

            As he did, Laurel caught Audra eyeing her in the rear view mirror and felt uneasily that they might not be pulling as much over on her as Brendan assumed they were.

            But before either of the women could say anything, if either was going to, Brendan was back in the car, presenting the keys to Audra with a smile.

            They drove forward, gravel crunching under the tires, past a perfect curve of pink-blossomed crape myrtles lining both sides of a split rail fence along the road.   Wind stirred the tall, spare pines around them.   Laurel found herself craning forward to look.   As the house appeared between the trees, she felt a jolt.

             It was an English country house of white-painted brick with a steeply pitched roof of what looked like real gray slate, two chimneys, a round upper balcony with white-painted iron railing, and gray shutters.    It seemed whole from the front, but the overwhelming feeling was that it was not.    There was part that just seemed to be missing.

            And angry, Laurel thought absurdly. 

            As Audra drove the circle to come up to the front, Laurel got a glimpse of the rest of the house, and realized what was so wrong.   There was another whole house connected to the front one, this one much longer, made of brick with white columns and trim, set perpendicular to the white front part.   Unbelievably, there seemed to be yet another white house behind that, at the other end of the brick part, but just as soon as Laurel had spied it that glimpse was gone.   Audra stopped by the path leading to the front door and shut off the engine.

            “Welcome to the Folger House.”

            The solid oak door creaked open into a small entry with glazed brick floors, surprisingly dark compared to the lightness of the house outside.   The room had a greenish tinge, from the garden green-painted wainscoting running halfway up the wall.   Laurel was reminded of the Spanish-style houses around Santa Barbara, and she had a sudden, painful memory of  - the dream - and her midnight ride from the hotel.   She pushed the thought away and forced herself back to the present as she followed Audra and Brendan into the house.

Across the green entry there were two steps up into a second, larger entry with a fireplace and a long wood bench like a church pew facing it.   Laurel glanced over a family portrait above the fireplace mantel, a crude, colorful painting of two parents and two children that gave her a strange sense of unease, but she had no time to study it before Audra stepped forward to begin her narration.   “This is actually the newer portion of the house,” she explained, “The part that was added on when James and Julia moved in permanently.”   Laurel looked around her at the cool, quiet rooms. 

 Past the fireplace were stairs down to a small empty room of indeterminate function to the right, with the same glazed brick floors, and what looked like a bathroom beyond.   On the left there was a short hall with a glimpse of a dark-paneled study at the end.    Very odd rooms to have at the entry of a house, Laurel thought.   There was dust like a fine sprinkling of baby powder everywhere, but otherwise the house was in surprisingly good condition.

            “Hmmm,” Laurel smiled vaguely at Audra.

             On the fourth wall of the second entry there was a door into a much wider and taller hall with dark hardwood floors and white walls.   Laurel and Brendan followed Audra into it.    An elegant staircase curved up to the right, with a tall bay window that looked out over enormous, overgrown gardens.   Past a window seat, the stairs took another upward turn and disappeared.

            Brendan took Laurel’s hand again as they walked forward.  She frowned at him and he nodded ahead toward Audra, shrugging helplessly (with a  What can I do? look.)   Laurel pressed her lips together and went along.   His hand was strong and warm around her fingers and she was suddenly electrically aware of his presence beside her.

            At the end of this hall there was an archway, with three short steps leading down, and then out of nowhere, a huge room, the size of a small ballroom, with two fireplaces, smoky mirrors in gilt frames lining the walls and a wide, rectangular expanse of hardwood floor.  

Laurel was about to follow Audra through the archway when she felt a chill run through her entire body.

            “Here,” she said aloud, and Brendan turned back to look at her.   Laurel pulled her hand from his and touched the doorjamb and thought she felt the faintest shock, like static electricity.   “They cut the house here.”

            “Yes, I believe you’re right,” Audra acknowledged, with an appraising glance at Laurel.

            They all moved down the steps into the great room.  Aside from a few end tables with marble tops, the only furniture in the room was a battered, dusty grand piano.

            “This is the older house,” Audra said, unnecessarily; the feeling of the room was completely different, much older and more complicated.   The ceiling was high with a raised ornamental design in the dome, and the crown molding had plaster medallions  at intervals all the way around the room.  Two bay windows with dusty panes flanked a set of equally filmy French doors which led out onto what must have been absolutely stunning gardens, several acres of them, now so overgrown with wisteria and yellow jasmine and honeysuckle Laurel thought instantly of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

          The bare floors shone even through their layer of dust and Laurel noted they were heart of pine (heart pine) but far older than the floors in her own house… she could see the wide planks had been fastened by hand-carved wood dowels instead of nails.

            Then she froze, staring at a spot halfway across the floor.

            Brendan opened his mouth to speak to Audra, but Laurel dug her nails into his palm and pointed.

            In the solid layer of dust on the floor, there were footprints.    Smallish and soft-soled, like footsteps on the beach, headed away from them, toward the archway to the next room.

            But they began in the middle of the floor, and left off well before the doorway, just five or six of them, and then nothing but undisturbed dust.

ESP, parapsychology, Zener cards, research, and THE UNSEEN

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Hmm, something big is happening this week… if only I could…

Oh, RIGHT!!! The Unseen is out on Tuesday! THIS TUESDAY!!!

The Unseen is a book that has been percolating for a long, long, LONG time.

I’m sure a good number of you recognize these:

The Zener ESP cards.

I don’t know about you, but just the sight of those images gives me a thrill. Maybe I mean, chill… because it’s all about the unknown. Do we have that sixth sense, the freaking power of extra-sensory perception, or do we not?

Well, parapsychologist Dr. J.B. Rhine said we do. All of us. And in the late 1920’s, on through the 1960’s, he used the brand-new science of statistics to prove it, in controlled laboratory experiments that made him a household name.

I have no idea how I first came to hear about this, but then again, I grew up in California, specifically, Berkeley - and astrology and Tarot and meditation and anything groovy and psychic was just part of everyday life.

And it was very, very early that I first heard of Dr. Rhine and the ESP tests. In fact, my sister the artist made a set of her own Zener cards when we were in just fourth or fifth grade. I swear, it was in the air.

Here’s the principle: take a pack of twenty-five Zener cards, five sets of five simple symbols: a circle, a square, a cross, a star, and two wavy lines, like water. Two subjects sit on opposite sides of a black screen, unable to see each other, and one subject, the Sender, takes the pack of ESP cards and looks at each card, one at a time, while the Receiver sorts another set of cards into appropriate boxes, depending on what card s/he thinks the Sender is holding and communicating.

Pure chance is twenty percent, or five cards right out of a deck. Because if you have five cards, chance dictates that you would guess right 20 percent of the time.

So anyone who scores significantly more than 20 percent is demonstrating some ESP ability. (The Rhine lab generally used 5 sets of cards for each test run).

You can try it online at any number of places, including here.

And seriously, don’t we all – or haven’t we all at some point – think we have some of that? It’s kind of seductive, isn’t it?

Now, what Dr. Rhine was doing with these Zener cards was truly revolutionary. By the 1920’s the whole world, pretty much, was obsessed with the occult and spiritualism, especially the idea of life after death and the concept of being able to connect with dead loved ones on whatever plane they were now inhabiting.

There were many factors that contributed to this obsession, but two in particular:

1. Darwin’s publication of THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, in 1859, which began a worldwide anxiety about whether there was any afterlife at all… and a fanatic desire to prove there was… especially among some scientists, interestingly enough.

And

2. The Great War, or as we know it now, WWI, in which so many people died so quickly that traumatized relatives were desperate to contact their lost – children, to be blunt - infants, as in “infantry”, underage cannon fodder – and have some hope that they were not lost for eternity.

The Great War really kicked spiritualism into high gear.

This was the age of “mediums”, most of whom were total frauds, con artists who used parlor magician tricks to dupe grieving relatives into believing their lost loved ones were coming back to give them messages – for a hefty price.

Well, (after a brief stint in botany and an abrupt switch to psychology) Dr. J.B. Rhine began his career debunking fraudulent mediums. His commitment to the truth won him a reputation for scientific integrity and a position at the newly established parapsychology lab at Duke University in North Carolina, the first ever in the U.S., where Rhine and his mentor, William McDougall, embarked on a decades-long quest to use the brand-new science of statistics and probability to test the occurrence of psychic phenomena such as ESP and psychokinesis (the movement of objects with the mind).

Using Zener cards and automated dice-throwing machines, Rhine tested thousands of students under laboratory conditions, and by applying the science of statistics to the results, came to believe that ESP actually does occur.

Rhine’s wife and colleague, Dr. Louisa Rhine, conducted her own parallel study, in which she gathered thousands of accounts from all over the world of psychic occurrences and followed up with interviews, from which she isolated several extremely common recurring patterns of psychic experiences, such as:

Crisis apparitions: in which a loved one appears to another loved one at a moment of extreme trauma or death.

Precognitive dreams: dreaming a future event.

Visitations in dreams: a dead loved one coming to a loved one in her or his sleep to impart some crucial bit of information.

Sympathetic pain: in which a loved one feels pain in a limb or elsewhere in the body when another loved one is injured in that place (often this is birth pains that a female relative will experience when a daughter or other female relative goes into labor).

The Rhines’ daughter, psychologist Sally Rhine Feather, has written a fascinating book on the above called THE GIFT, which was extremely helpful in my research for The Unseen.

Now, most people who read about the paranormal and parapsychology, even casually, are aware of Dr. Rhine and his ESP research. But most people are not as aware that researchers in the Duke lab also did field investigations of poltergeists, starting in the late 50’s and early sixties.

Poltergeists!

I don’t know about you, but that just rocks my world. What ARE they? Are they the projected repressed sex energy of frustrated adolescents? Are they ghosts? Are they some other kind of extra-dimensional entity? Is it all just a fraud, a fad, perpetrated by people who wanted media attention before the advent of reality TV?

So I’ve always wanted to so something, sometime, about the whole Rhine/Duke/ESP/poltergeist thing.

And then a few years ago I was visiting Michael in North Carolina and, as he is wont to do, he handed me a column torn out of the newspaper about a lecture on the Duke campus called: “Secrets of the Rhine Parapsychology Lab” and said, “You should go to that.” Because he knows I like that kind of thing, but he had no idea that I’ve been obsessed with Rhine since I was – seven, eight, whatever.

And I did go to the lecture, and I was stupefied to learn that after the parapsychology lab officially closed in 1965, when Dr. Rhine reached the mandatory age of retirement, seven hundred boxes of original research files were sealed and shut up in the basement of the graduate library, and had only just been opened to the public again.

Is that a story or what?

All those questions that instantly spring to mind. Why did the lab close, really? (Well, in truth, Dr. Rhine retired. But what if…) Why were the files sealed? Was someone trying to hide something? And most importantly - What the HELL is in those boxes? SEVEN HUNDRED boxes?

So you know that question authors love: Where do you get your ideas?

That’s where I got my idea for The Unseen. From the double extra large Southern man I live with. Get yourself one, they’re worth the trouble. Most of the time.

But it all started with a childhood obsession and years of random research on the subject that suddenly caught fire with some specific field research and one choice factoid.

So the lesson here, I think, is –

Forage widely. If a lecture at a library or university sounds intriguing, take a chance and go. You might get a whole book handed to you. And just always be adding to those open files in your head of potential projects. Read voraciously on the subjects that interest you. All this random research does eventually achieve critical mass, and suddenly you have a book.

We are so lucky as writers that our JOB is to pursue the things we’re passionate about. Take advantage and enjoy the hell out of it.

So now, for those of you who find the above intriguing, and/or who like your mysteries with a touch of the real-life uncanny, and/or who have gotten something out of my story structure posts, or who just love me in general, here’s your chance to show the love. Go buy The Unseen from your favorite independent bookstore RIGHT NOW, or if you can’t bear to think about getting dressed today, from Amazon(and then go buy great greeting cards and other people’s books from your favorite independent bookstorethe next time you’re dressed and out of the house. If ever. Because I’m hardly one to make assumptions about that.).

And if you have no money at all, don’t despair, because first, you’re not alone, as I think we’re all painfully aware these days…

And second, we all still have the great gift of our public libraries. Go online right now and reserve The Unseen from your local library. If they don’t have it yet, please please please - request it. Libraries have suffered cutbacks just like the rest of the known universe, but before the crash, the formula was that a library would buy a new hardcover for every five patrons who requested the book. So that is some truly powerful support you can give to your favorite authors: request a book, and that’s one-fifth of a hardcover sale, at no cost to you. Believe me, it really, really helps. (In fact, why not check out books by ten of your favorite authors every time you go to the library? I do, every single time. And I’m at the library A LOT.)

And now it’s your turn: tell us about a project that caught fire with the perfect research factoid. Or about a subject you wish you could find a thriller or mystery about. Or, on a completely different track: have you ever experienced a crisis apparition, a precognitive dream or visitation, or sympathetic pains? Or do you know anyone who has? Do you believe these things happen?

Have a great Memorial Day holiday.

And I hope you enjoy The Unseen.

- Alex

(I'm doing a very laid back, non-Konrath, un-type-A blog tour in between running around doing the physical tour thing, so check my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors blog if you'd like to drop in!)