No Better Than The Paper He's Written On

   Who is the the most important character in a murder mystery? If you answered "the detective" you're only half right. Certainly the detective, or hero is the central character. This is the one we spend the most time with. Often it is through the eyes of this character that we view the story. There is no doubt this person is the main character. But is she/he the most important?
   A strong argument can be made that the murderer is the most important character. Think about it. His/Her actions are the foundations of the entire plot. He commits the murder. Your whole story hangs from that all important plot point. Without the murder there is no story.
   Unless there is a murder Hercule Poirot  has no exercise for the little gray cells. Miss Marple has no reason to put down her knitting. Dr. Gideon Fell has no reason to stop work on his monumental "History of Beer Drinking Habits of The English People". Even Betsey Devonshire has no reason to leave her needlework shop.
  So as a reader I am particularly annoyed by two-dimensional murderers  I just plowed through some sixty-five thousand words for a cardboard cut out.
   For starters, how about we give him a reason to kill. Too many times I have seen two hundred pages of engaging plot end in "He did it 'cause he's crazy". Or the ever present "it was an accident!" Please! You know what you do in that case? You call the ambulance and the cops. You cry real tears and shout "mea culpa" all over the place. Ta Da, the story ends in an easy two hundred pages. Though now it  a tragedy instead of a mystery.
   Give him a reason to kill! Need; the need, to hide someting, the need to keep something. Love; the love of self, the love of another, the love money, (come on who doesn't love money?). And nothing drives an antagonist like good old fashioned revenge.
   Give your murderer some depth. Make him likable. Give me a reason to be surprised he murdered six people with a spatchula and a rubber band. And please above all else do not resort to  serial  killers I loath a serial killer. As a plot twist it is singularly unimaginative.
   All that  I am asking for is a murderer with a little more depth than the paper he's printed on.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Keyboard

  If you're wondering where I was all weekend, I was at the public library, plugging away at my novel. I take my I pod, stick in my earphones crank the volume, and do my best to ignore the other patrons. This takes some doing. They want to sit at your table while there are five empty ones. They want to make friends. They want you to come to their church. They want to sell you something. They want to know if your seeing anyone. I want to know is there any way to make them go away short of a gun.
   Of course I have my favorites as well. There Is the nicely dressed older lady who is having a conversation with herself and her six other personalities. (As someone with her own imaginary friends I can relate.) And I confess to some fondness for the college student at the next table. His interest in me extends just far enough to keep an eye on my computer while I am in the rest room, in exchange for the same service. Other than that we each pretend the other is not there. My absolute favorite though, is the off duty cop two tables away. He answers every interaction with, "Ma'am as long as you're not hanging yourself with the blind cord I don't care."
   As fraught with distraction as the library is, it is easier to work there than home. At home there is the ever present 35 pounds of constant distraction.
  "Mommy I love you."
  "I love you too dear."
  "Mommy, your name is mommy"
  "I know  sweetie." And off he goes again. He returns two and on half min. later, in the middle of a particularly tricky scene.
  "Mommy I need a mustache."
  "I'm sorry you what?"
  "I need a mustache! Like Daddy's."
   "Well, when Daddy comes home ask if you can borrow his."  He nodes as if this makes perfect sense and runs off. I'm stunned that it worked.
   Thirty seconds later he's back. "Mommy I need scotch tape. Right Now!"
   "Here, have the whole role. Go crazy." And he's gone again This buys me almost ten min. of uninterrupted silence. At this point I honestly don't care if he tapes the whole house.
  "Mommy, where is my ping pong ball? It was right here. And now IT'S GONE!!!" I desperately search my memory for a ping pong ball. We don't have one. Okay. Which toy  has been nicked named ping pong?
  "Do you mean your hacky sack?"
   "Um, no."
  "Do you mean the toy you got from Burger King yesterday?"
  "Yeah! YEAH! YEAH!!"
   "There on your table, next to your Mickey Mouse chicken" He stares right at it, pokes it with his little finger.
   "I don't see it."
  "Right there in front of you."
  "Uhh. Its not." When I get up and walk over there to hand it to him he yells "Oh there it is."
  "Uhh Mommy. I has a car. And the car has six guys and rockets. And Anna is in the sport car. She drive really fast. And these guys has paint and the pant stick on a rocket and the car and rocket and paint and frog." (wait where did the frog come from)" And the frog and the snow make a vegetable. I don't eat vegetables. They is yucky. And then I put the race on side ways." Maybe that's why the little plastic building is on its side. He says it's sleeping. How it can sleep with the cars and steamroller rushing in and out I don't know. "And the car hits the lots of little trees. And the trees scream, 'ahhahhhahahhh Stop hitting us!' I think they stopping Mommy. Hey Mimi the cars and the motorcycle is stopping."
  Mommy is thinking of 'stopping since she is getting nothing done.
  "Mommy, I going to grow giant. And then I going to be Daddy."
  "You mean You'll be like Daddy."
  "No, I be Daddy."
  Yeah, I think I'm done for the day.

You Think I read The Crap I Write?

  My friend Kate S. recently went on a rant (an unusual occurrence as Kate S is spectacularly good-natured). She had been watching a TV series on DVD, and apparently the end was disappointing.
  "When you write a TV series," she said. "And you come up with a wonderful, crazy, diabolical puzzle, it should be required by law that you have a solution BEFORE you are allowed to make the show. Because other wise you get to the end and you say 'Crap I can't explain that'. So you don't. AND IT SUCKS!"
   It brought to mind an interview with a script writer I had read. When questioned exhaustively about the "inconsistencies" in the series he wrote he replied"What? You think I watch this shit? I have a life!"
    As shocking as this attitude was in a television writer, I found it more annoying in an Author. In one of my favorite series there is a wonderful moment between the heroine and the detective who becomes her love interest. They look at each other across the ransacked  room and she reveals what really happened the night her husband died.
  It's a carefully crafted scene, filled with emotion, that lays the foundation for their growing relationship. One problem, the author forgot about it. or her characters suffered from collective amnesia. During the series she will go on to reveal her deep dark secret a grand total of FOUR times. And each time he reacts as if he never heard it before.
   Each repetition was less well written and lacked the emotional impact of that first scene. Finally in the last book the reveal holds all the import of, "Honey, the cable is out". He says "You never told me that" and the reader says, "Yes, she did! In books one, three and five." The heroine responds with "I never even told my son", and the the reader says, "Yes, you did! In book three when you were freaked that the actress your husband had an affair with turned up and he was all "Mom WTF"! At this point the reader wonders if the author reads her own books,.
    The obvious answer would be no. But almost everyone I talked to had been disappointed in one way or another by a writer. My sister still remembers a series three decades ago that cut off in the middle leaving the protagonist stranded in the desert. My entire family (myself included) remembers when a series facing cancellation scrambled for a solution to the mystery that drove the plot. The problem was there was no way the character tagged as the unknown villain could have committed the crime that the entire story rested on.
   No one is perfect. And I do not think that readers or viewers expect perfection from writers. But I do think they expect answers to the questions the author poses. So keep track of your plot. And if you raise questions do your best to answer them. Because if left unanswered those questions never go away. And if all else fails, read your own books damn it!

I Used My Title For My Opening Sentence

   What to Do when you realize your your unpublished novel is older than your child? The child in question is three, and we will not discuss the age of the novel. And of course they are both unfinished. In the case of the child this does not seem any great cause for concern (like I said he's only three). In the case of the novel it is a constant source of frustration.
  Before my name became Mommy I used to stay up all night and crank out page after page. My husband would get up to go to work and shepard a bleary-eyed wife to bed, while answering, with perfect equimenty questions such as, "Do I kill her before or after the party?" "Would one more dead body be one too many?", and "How come that guy at Poison Control has no sense of humor?"
   But a newborn does not leave one a lot of spare time, even with the efforts of a helpful family. And so I fell out of the writing "habit". I returned in fits in starts, but found a regular schedule hard to maintain in the face of a growing child's demands.
   As a stay-at-home Mom I have not held a paying job in over five years. Ever increasing living expenses have me wondering how to pick up a little extra cash. One obvious answer is finish the book and coerce...uh, I mean convince someone to buy it. The second option is to sell Viagra on-line. Stay tuned to see which it will be.