file this under WTF

International Thriller Writers
I was a member in 2006, but intentionally didn't renew in 2007.

So today I receive a dues letter that reads like this:

"we wanted to give you the opportunity to keep your membership active by bringing your dues up to date."

That is followed by a renewal fee for 2008 -- BUT ALSO FOR 2007, when I wasn't even a member. Total 240.00. Umm, okay. Now I'm expecting a letter from the Girl Scouts giving me the opportunity to pay for 35 years of dues.

spring update

some interesting things I’ve discovered about my new place:

This used to be a town. Everything burned down except for the church, which explains why it’s in the middle of nowhere.

The lumber baron who started the town and built the church had an interest in horticulture. He cultivated his own variety of lilacs, naming them after himself and the now non-existent town. These lilacs grow on both sides of the front door. Lilacs are my favorite flower, and I can’t wait to see the color. I’m guessing white, but I’m hoping for lavender.














I haven’t run into anybody in the area who can tell me anything about the history of this place or the history of the family who built the town and church, but I’ve found some info online. Here is just a small section of the founder’s bio that covers the later years of his. It looks like he semi-retired and lived out his final years here. I know the church was built in 1895, so that fits the bio. It’s so strange to think of someone buying ground and building a town in just a few years. He and his wife had one son who was always in poor health. At one point they moved to California hoping that the weather would improve the child’s health, but the son died and it sounds like both parents were never quite the same after that.





online bio:

"In 1892 he purchased a larger tract of hardwood timber. Here he gave his attention to the manufacture of railway material, chiefly crossties and car stock. Besides his own mill he controlled the output of many smaller mills, which business he conducted for several years, from 1895 to 1899. He passed away June 22, 1903, at his residence in Wis., and his body was taken to Santa Rosa, Cal., for burial at the side of his son. His health failed him during the last five years of his life, though most of the time he was fairly well and able to attend to his business. During the last three years only the care of the farm engrossed his attention. There he seemed most happy since he was particularly fond of animals and outdoor life. Two weeks before his death he had a slight paralysis of his left side, apparently of a few hours' duration. He sat up and read thereafter every day until the end came. His charities were large and unostentatious. He maintained a free hospital bed without disclosing his name, gave liberally to other hospitals, and assisted several young men to an education and in business. He was a large-hearted, generous, kind considerate man, a noble citizen, endeared to his family." Of him it was also said: "No man in the great Northwest more deserved success and none has left a more honorable record."

road closed ahead

As many of you know, I plan to stop posting at the end of the year. Might be back in the spring. We’ll see. I spent a large part of the day putting together my final post. It was full of things like how much fun I've had, and how I'll miss you, but blogger ate the post. Somehow that seems fitting and certainly reminds me of what I won't be missing. So that touching goodbye is gone and I'm not going to retype it.




But this still seems a good time to reflect on 2007.

The highlight of my year was definitely my trip to Sweden. It’s going to be hard to top that. Ever. Other major events – selling my house and moving. Twice!

On the writing front, an exciting high point was reading Jamie Ford’s HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET (coming spring 2009). I’ve been a fan of Jamie’s writing for a couple of years, and my expectations were high. I wasn’t disappointed. The story is amazing, and I predict it will be a major Hollywood movie.

Other blogging friends have signed with agents and finished books, and sales with top houses can’t be far behind. Look out 2008!

This also seems the place to list the top 3 searches that bring people from outside the writing world to my blog. *sniff*



number 3 -- VODKA ENEMA (a popular search this time of the year. :O)

number 2 -- ROOT CANAL VERSUS PULLING THE TOOTH (I eventually chose root canal.)


and the number one topic that continuously brings new readers from around the world to my blog:

WOMAN BREASTFEEDING PUPPY


I think that pretty much says it all.

acorns roasting on a manifold

just had to share this:

smoke started coming from under the hood, and the car filled with a horrid smell. i expected to become a flaming land torpedo at any second. got the car to a shop. took them all day, but they finally solved the mystery.

acorns.

yes, the mice have followed me.

grave?

or not a grave? i think it's a grave.





















HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

book trailer

here's another one of my daughter's book trailers. i think she did a fantastic job with it.




if you're interested in having her create a trailer for your book, send me an email or leave a comment here and i'll get the contact info to you.

Happy Holidays and Campaign for the American Reader

It's time for my annual posting of the glogg recipe!

GLOGG
1/2 cup vodka
1 - 3 cinnamon sticks
10 cloves
1 teaspoon cardamom

At least twenty-four hours before serving, put above ingredients in container with lid. Shake well, then shake occasionally throughout day.

2 liters of wine. Sangria works well, but any sweet, fruity wine will do.
1/2 cup sugar (more or less, to taste)
Vodka mixture, with cloves and cinnamon sticks strained out.

Put everything in a large pan. Heat well, but don't boil.

Serve with raisins and sliced almonds. These should be put in individual cups before adding about 1/2 cup hot liquid.


CAMPAIGN FOR THE AMERICAN READER

Marshall McLuhan suggested that you should choose your reading by turning to page 69 of a book and, if you like it, read it.

To further explore this notion another Marshal -- Marshal Zeringue -- started a fantastic blog in 2006 called Campaign for the American Reader where he invites writers to put the page 69 theory to test. I've been a guest twice, most recently for Garden of Darkness. Check out the blog and the archives.


Campaign for the American Reader

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view from front door

view from front door,
originally uploaded by annefrasier2000.

new pics up at flickr!

huh?

In all the chaos of moving, I almost forgot I have a book coming out! And apparently it's on shelves a few days early.


I'm still settling into the new place. Absolutely love it, although I have to admit it's a bit spooky walking up to the front door in the dead of night.





I'll be signing copies of Garden of Darkness at my favorite bookstore --
where: Once Upon a Crime
when: Saturday, December 8, 1:00 - 3:00

Stop in and say hi if you're in the area! If you aren't in the area or can't make it, feel free to call Pat or Gary and order personalized, signed copies. They ship!

getting back to the garden

this was the year to unfuck my life, and i suddenly find myself moving into the third and final phase of that plan. we close on the new place today, and i'll be cleaning and moving until Thanksgiving. i won't have internet until the last week of november, but i'll probably run to a nearby town once or twice to check my gmail and peek in here. (i lost a lot of mail and email addresses with my two computer swaps, so please use my gmail address. i dislike gmail, but i can now really see the benefit.)

i moved to the city almost eight years ago. i've always said living here is a little like being held underwater.

don't get me wrong. i love the twin cities and i always thought i would be able to adjust, but it never happened. I've spent years searching for solitude and quiet in order to write, but solitude and quiet doesn't exist here. This place is all about noise and energy.

I thought the condo would simplify my life, but instead it complicated it in a very water torture, mundane sort of way. By early July i was losing my mind and looking for a cabin in northern MN and WI. cold was no longer an issue -- escape was. i'd been looking for an old church or schoolhouse off and on for seven years, but i'd pretty much given up on that idea when i came upon the church listing.

a weird chain of events led to it -- the sale of my house -- which in this market i now realize was in itself amazing, the unsuitable condo situation, stumbling across the church listing completely by chance, a buyer's market, a seller/architect who had hoped an artist of some sort would live in the world he'd created, an absolutely amazing real estate agent i originally didn't want to work with because i was dead set against working with a guy, a mortgage broker who never gave up. So many people working so hard to make something happen. I also think the trip to Sweden reset my brain and got me off autopilot at just the right time.




As writers, I wonder if we sometimes have a harder time figuring out our own lives because we view the world through so many eyes. We know what our characters want, but we don't always know what we want.

We live so many lives that aren't our own, and maybe we live our lives less fully because of that.


so will this final phase unfuck my life? maybe. maybe not.

on display with nothin' to say

blogging:

The thing that's been really frustrating is that I can't talk about what I want to talk about. Shortly after starting this blog, I found my locked lips so frustrating that I started another semi-anonymous blog where I vented and talked about my personal experiences in publishing. A fellow writer ended up reporting me and the blog...to somebody. After that experience, I pulled the plug on my "secret" blog, but wow -- I would have had some interesting and unbelievable stuff to post there.

Almost every day I think of something I want to blog about, and almost every day I think I'd better not say that. Even topics that on the surface seem fairly harmless. So anyway, rather than go on and on about me and my boring life, I'm going to close my blog at the end of this year. It might not be a permanent close. I'm going to wait and see if I feel like opening it again in the spring or summer.

defining a generation

for some it's the Beatles.
for some it's Dylan.
for me it's always been Neil Young.

I love so many bands and so many different kinds of music, but if I had to choose one band or one musician, it would be Neil Young. I've had obsessions with bands that will last a few years, then I tend to put the music away and remember it as a certain period of my life. The Pixies period. The Joy Division period. The Velvet Underground period. The Belle and Sebastian period. But Neil Young was never an artist I put away to bring out occasionally. Been listening to him ever since Buffalo Springfield.

Last night as we filed into Northrup Auditorium, I kept looking at the ticket in my hand. Never thought I'd hold one with his name on it.

He was amazing. His voice sounds like it did forty years ago. He started out with an acoustic set. He was the only one on stage, and would move from instrument to instrument. Then came the electric set and he pretty much blew the place away.



11-08-2007, Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis, Minnesota
w/ Rick Rosas, Ben Keith, Ralph Molina, Anthony Crawford & Pegi Young

1. From Hank To Hendrix
2. Ambulance Blues
3. Sad Movies
4. A Man Needs A Maid
5. No One Seems To Know
6. Harvest
7. After The Gold Rush
8. Mellow My Mind
9. Love Art Blues
10. Love Is A Rose
11. Heart Of Gold
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12. The Loner
13. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
14. Dirty Old Man
15. Spirit Road
16. Bad Fog Of Loneliness
17. Winterlong
18. Oh, Lonesome Me
19. The Believer
20. No Hidden Path
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21. Cinnamon Girl
22. Like A Hurricane

Restless Dawn

Jason is holding another short fiction contest!

The Clarity of Night

RIP MacBook

no, i haven't reposted an old entry. my NEW MacBook started acting sluggish, then quit working after five days. wouldn't recognize the hard drive. i took it to apple and they got it going again. thought maybe things had just come loose during shipping. it started the sluggish thing again a few days ago, then yesterday when i tried to restart, it once again showed no hard drive. this time they gave me a new computer, but acted suspicious and said they'd never seen this problem before. i know the first generation macbooks had a lot of problems, which is why i put off getting one as long as possible. anybody else have a similar macbook experience?

of mice and men

i'm in the process of packing and i will be moving in two weeks. yay!! i can't wait!! there were so many obstacles to buying the church, but one by one they were resolved and everything is in order and set to close.

the mouse situation here is still unbelievable. i've never experienced anything like it, and i've lived in some dumps. even though it's cold, i have windows open and window fans going around the clock, and still the smell of dead mice is overpowering and makes me dizzy. i was told to put out poison, and i go through one small box a day. i've thought of reporting it to the health department, but i hate to do that because i think the condo owner will get in trouble when it is really the fault of the association. they do absolutely nothing about anything. nothing. after six months, my phone number still hasn't been entered in the box at the front door. but every time I run into the guy who's supposed to do it, he says he'll do it in a few days. haha! it's really a shame, because this is such a cool, beautiful building, but a condo is only as good as the association.


i'm a really negative person, and i know i always look for the negative in every situation, but this mouse thing -- it's bad.


oh, and just having a cat in the house will not keep them away. my poor old cat is scared of them. :D he went to his scratching post and a mouse eeked and jumped out at him. the cat scrambled and has been paranoid and nervous ever since.

but all things considered, i'm glad i tried living here because for years i've wondered if it wouldn't be easier to live in a condo or apartment where somebody else takes care of things. foolish me.

Garden of Darkness prologue

Happy Halloween!
This seemed a good day to post a little snippet from Garden of Darkness. The odd thing about this prologue is that it was page 200 in the first draft. While working on the second draft, I decided to move it to the very beginning.








GARDEN OF DARKNESS

Prologue

Where does the wind begin?

A dank breeze rose from the ground like one long exhaled breath. It lifted fallen leaves and swirled them up into the night sky. The leaves moved as if they knew where they were going, as if they had a destination. They flew past open windows where children were tucked in bed, hushed words snatched from sweet mouths and replaced with new ones.

“Where does the wind begin?” one child asked another.

“The Tuonela River,” the other child replied.

“What’s going on up there?” a mother called from below.

The children looked at each other in fear. “Nothing.” But they felt strange. Had a soft hand caressed them? Just a brush down the cheek, leaving a trail of goosebumps behind?

Sweet, sweet babies.

He drew nearer and inhaled their soap scent, and his breath stirred the fine hair on their heads.

Time was different here.

He could smell the river: wet driftwood, shells and bones gleaming on the shore. In the black mud of the river bottom, giant catfish slept the deep sleep in filtered light that was bent and reshaped. Never surfacing, the catfish waited patiently for prey to come close enough to catch and swallow whole.

Sweet, sweet life.

The damp night wind was tinged with sorrow and loss and longing.

Oh, to be complete, to be whole.

Some people said he was bad. But that was like saying a bear was bad when it caught a fish. It was like saying a cat was bad when it ate a bird. It was all about survival and nature. The bear wasn’t bad. The cat wasn’t bad.

He wasn’t bad.

Two places called to him, the old and the new.

For a moment he was confused. In his mind the two places meshed and he couldn’t separate them. Time moved forward and backward and the passage of a hundred years seemed like hours. Time unfolded and turned in on itself and his loss became something that hadn’t yet happened, and the strength and power he’d once known could possibly be found again.

He left the children and soared from the house, up through the roof but not as far as the stars. He joined a flock of night birds as they moved out of town, shifting and changing, blocking the moonlight.

On the ground far below, a man walking his dog felt the curious movement of air. He looked up, his face a white oval. He seemed to shrug and dismiss the sudden heaviness. But when the dog whimpered, he turned and hurried home.

Something was coming. Something had been coming for a long time. Something big. Powerful. Something that would shake the residents of Tuonela.

He soared.

To the old place.

His home.

Over the house built from native stone. Over the bare, rolling hillside that met dark woodland. Through the trees, silent and secret.

A light in the night.

A lantern and the sound of a shovel striking rocky ground.

This must be what it was like to astral project. To find yourself watching yourself. Because the man below was him, but not him.

The dead – they were everywhere. He could see their faces in the bark of the trees and the patterns made by the twisting leaves. Like him, they were looking for bodies to inhabit. Unlike him, they would take any vessel. He wanted one and only one.
The man on the ground seemed unaware of the dead surrounding him. He remained focused on his digging, never looking up. His heart pounded from exertion; steam rose from his shoulders.

Go inside.

The coaxing command seemed to come from the faces in the bark and the faces in the leaves. Who were they?

Don’t you remember us?
Don’t you remember your followers?

One face in particular became more distinct, the voice seeming to separate from the singsong chant of the others.
The scent of sage and lavender invaded his head. And somehow he could feel the softness of her skin under his fingertips.

Come inside, Richard.

Richard. That’s who he was. Richard Manchester, the Pale Immortal. And this was his land -- the land of the dead.

Come inside.

The man below stabbed the shovel into the ground, then released it and straightened, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.

The night birds were gone. They had done their duty by bringing him here, and now they were asleep in the trees, heads tucked beneath black wings.

Richard hovered above the man with the shovel. Foolish person. Digging for secrets on the ground when the secret is above you. When the secret is in you.



Garden of Darkness
a paperback original coming December 4
from Penguin and Onyx Books

sharpen your brains

CRIMESPACE SHORT STORY COMPETITION 2008!


Crimespace

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would you buy a book written by this person?

my interview is up at in for questioning, and i finally really, really get why people never believe it when i tell them i'm a writer. heh!!

angie did a fantastic job!!! i had so much fun. a little too much maybe, but that's okay!

In for Questioning

don't forget to check out
In For Questioning






New interviews every Monday. I've even added the link to my google homepage so I can see when a new post goes up. It is all so fun and laid back, which means Angie was able to talk me into a phone interview. gulp. I think that goes up on the 29th. everyone else sounds so together and intelligent. this was my typical response: i dunno. giggle, giggle. i dunno. giggle giggle.

and when she asked for a photo, i happened to come across this:





yep, that's me. that's the kind of photo a person should never let anyone else see. but it's also entertaining and just weird as hell. we were playing around with shadows and intense stage lighting. apparently it revealed the weird old shadowman who lives inside me.


this was taken at the same time:

the beginning!!

my wonderful mortgage broker appealed the loan rejection, and my file was personally delivered to another group of decision makers. dave called this afternoon to tell me they signed off on it and everything is go again!!!!!!! i'm still trying to process the whole thing. it's like digging up a body after you've had the funeral. so now the last hurdle is the inspection, which will take place next week.

i'm still in shock.