I Get a Kick Out of . . . ?

I get no kick from champagne

Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all . . .

So sang Frank Sinatra, though there were rumors to the contrary about the lifestyle of Old Blue Eyes.

It's definitely true for me, however. I've been a teetotaler since I took a sip of the nasty wine our landlord made in the cellar when I was a kid. They say there's some good stuff out there now, but it's just as well I don't taste it. What if I end up liking it and consuming alcohol the way I do Sees scotchmallows (why doesn't Sees have tasting rooms?) or hazelnut gelato? You'd be holding my hair back every night while I … never mind.

What does thrill me, besides my hubby, The Cable Guy?

Sometimes just a little arithmetic will do it. Like when my table companions let me calculate the tip or someone asks me to multiply 36 x 11. (There's a trick for multiplying quickly by 11 at the end of The Square Root of Murder. I'll bet you can hardly wait!)

I knew that the life of my new college math teacher protagonist, Professor Sophie Knowles, might not seem as exciting as that of skillet-wielding Stella Hardesty, for example, so I gave her a medevac pilot, ice-climbing boyfriend. Bruce sleeps in his EMS jumpsuit and answers to the call of the Batphone night after night. For some people, that's more thrilling than advanced calculus. Go figure.

I slipped out of ThrillerFest in New York earlier this month and visited the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle. Walked right into a thrilling exhibit of dioramas like this wrecked 1950s beauty parlor. Dystopias thrill me, especially in miniature form—the perfect combination of dark reality and a little bit of distance since nothing's big enough to hurt you.
I try to have four thrilling moments before lunch.

Here's what happened today:

1. I solved this exciting riddle: Tom's mother has three children. One is named April, one is named May. What is the third one named?

2. I read this thrilling quote from Alexander Calder, whose birthday is today, July 22: "I paint with shapes." It makes me think I can paint with words. Wow! Big thrill.

3. I got a kick out of these lyrics, rendered by Johnny Cash on the XM country channel in my car: "I've been flushed from the bathroom of your heart; up the elevator of your future I've been shafted."

4. I read the thrilling opening line of "Hexes and Hemlines," by Juliet Blackwell: "It didn't take a witch to figure out something was very, very wrong on the thirteenth floor of the Doppler Building."

I'm done for the day and it's only 10 in the morning! What's my biggest kick overall? Those wonderful readers, women and men we meet at conferences or book signings or on Facebook. Especially the followers of Pens Fatales: I get a kick out of you!

Camille Minichino is the author of three mystery series, beginning with her Periodic Table Mysteries. Her akas are Margaret Grace (The Miniature Mysteries) and Ada Madison (The Professor Sophie Knowles Mysteries). The first chapter of "The Square Root of Murder," (a July 2011 release) is on her website: http://www.minichino.com.

The Thrill Is In The Chase

The Pens would like to welcome a guest post from indie-pub newcomer, Cecilia Gray. Her paranormal romance bite-sized books will debut August 2011 with Falling, Book 1 of her Fallen Idols series.

I've been chasing publication as long as I can remember.

That kid who who scribbled books onto computer paper and bent them in half to staple a spine? I was that kid.

That teenager who angsted in her diary about how she wanted to be a writer when she grew up? I was that teenager.

That college student who snuck out of class to attend local writer group meetings?
I was that college student.

That adult who stayed up nights typing away worlds at her computer between jobs and a social life?
I am that adult.

Thanks to ebooks and ereaders, I've been given a unique opportunity to catch my quarry - publication - even in this not-quite-mainstream form.

I know the thrill is supposed to be in the chase, but like Lisa (congrats on releasing Blowback this week!!), I'm high on the thrill of publication. The thrill of being read. The thrill of having a story out in the wild.

I wonder if the taste of publication won't be as sweet as I'd imagined.
If the thrill will be gone.

The trick to this seems obvious.

Find more quarry.

That writer who wants to pen a bestseller?
I will be that writer.

Martha's List of Cheap Thrills

I am a sucker for that head to toe sizzling sensation.

Here are a few standbys that always get me going:

The Stratosphere Big Shot in Las Vegas



Rides like this don't always get to me, but maybe because this one's in Vegas, it's my favorite and I used to go several times a year. My husband planned to propose to me at the Big Shot! (Yes, planned is the operative word there...that's another story.)

I can't take you to the real thing so here's my next best shot at it:

The Kiss Sequence in Catch and Release



All right, so anything with Timothy Olyphant is a safe bet with me. I may have blogged about this before, but what makes this scene great is the range of emotions that happen in a 60 second sequence. I can barely make it through two sets of emotions in one long-ass scene. But in this scene, Jennifer Garner's character has just discovered Timothy Olyphant's character has been hiding her dead fiance's affair from her.

She begins the scene angry, moves to awareness and desire, and quickly to shame and loathing. He begins the scene annoyed, also moves to awareness and desire, and ends the scene with regret and yearning. Did I mention he's Timothy Olyphant? Sigh. Drool. All that.

Boy's 15 Year Old Bday on Michael Buble



In this clip, a mom talks her son onto stage at Michael Buble's concert citing his birthday. What follows is so genuine, I can't watch without grinning ear to ear and actually clapping.

I hope these thrill you as much as they thrill me!

"Thrill"-ing News

“Thrill”ing News

We Pens are a prolific lot, we are all working writers, whether we have books on the bookstore shelves or are not yet published. With the advent of a new era in publishing, some of us are making the switch from traditional paper publishing to self-publishing. It’s not a choice for everyone. And believe me, I want to be traditionally published as much as the next Pen!! But after a round of rejections from traditional publishers, I decided to self-publish my Black Cipher Files series which straddles the line between romance and thriller.

The first book, BLOWBACK, released today!!

Doesn't this cover ROCK? Madeira at Xuni.com is amazing!!

Most of my novels begin with a ‘What If?’ question. What if espionage agents were being kidnapped and injected with an unknown drug? Why? What are the long term implications for the espionage community? And who would investigate the kidnappings?

While I started playing around with the ‘what if?’ ideas, I was also reading a fascinating book on the National Security Agency, about both its past and present history. From that research, a fictitious branch of the NSA was born. I also postulated reasons for why certain committee documents from World War II are still classified. And my heroine Jamie Hunt came into existence. She is a very hard, very intense, very closed off woman. She doesn’t allow herself any emotional contact. Honestly, when writing her story my heart broke, because at our core we all need love. And she has a dearth of affection in her life.

Jamie’s parents and brother were killed in a horrific car bomb attack when she was just fifteen years old and to protect her sister, she agrees to let her sister believe she died too. Fast forward thirteen years later, Jamie is in trouble, her sister is in trouble, and Jamie has nowhere to turn.

Enter the hero, Lucas Goodman, who understands Jamie because he used to be just like her. He is determined to drag her into a relationship whether she wants to or not.

The biggest compliment a writer can get is that a reader keeps their book on a shelf and periodically re-reads it. I love reading thrillers. What I’ve discovered about myself, found after years of reading, is that the plot can be fun and convoluted and intense, but I won’t re-read a book unless the character and romance is emotional and memorable. The details of the plot are just a framework for the relationship.

Blowback has plenty of action, classified espionage secrets, and some fascinating science but Jamie’s growth as she finally allows herself to accept love is the reason I was drawn to writing this story.

Lisa

ps. And no I did NOT plan to release today, as a matter of fact, couldn’t believe it when the topic appeared in my inbox. Serendipity at its finest.

pps. Blowback is available on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Cipher-Files-Romantic-Thrillers-ebook/dp/B005D76F4U/ref=pd_rhf_p_img_1 And BN.com http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Blowback/Lisa-Hughey/e/2940012752567 right now. It will be coming to Smashwords in the next week or so.

ppps. REBIRTH (the next in Sophie's Aftertime trilogy--which is amazing) releases today!!!! It's a PENS release day :)

Reading Thrills

L.G.C. Smith

A delicious thrill I’ve indulged over the past several days has been the reader’s thrill of dipping into an author’s world and getting lost. Thank you, Lori Armstrong! Lori is from Rapid City, South Dakota, and her books are set in and around Rapid City and the fringes of the Black Hills. Everyone knows by now I was born in Deadwood and my mom grew up on a ranch in the Bear Butte Valley east of Sturgis. My dad’s folks lived in Rapid from 1966 until they died, and my parents lived there for eight years, during part of which I lived on the Rosebud Sioux reservation at Mission. Reading Lori’s books is like a visit home.


Okay, maybe scarier than that. Still and all, I can’t put them down. Lori captures the West River ethos dead on. Yeah, they’re mysteries and her protagonists pack more violence and dead bodies into a week than most South Dakotans, even those living in Shannon County, see in ten years, so that’s a little unrealistic, but hey—she made my spine creep the same way it did when I read student essays with titles like “11 Barred Doors to Freedom: Inside Leavenworth,” or a journal entry from a meat packer about how her father raped her when she was a kid. Western South Dakota can be pretty rough.

I love a good fictional world, be it Middle Earth or Westeros, the far reaches of the universe, C.E. Murphy’s Seattle, Stacia Kane’s Downside, Mayfair in 1814 or any of a thousand imagined places, but none of those are quite as thrilling as looking into another writer’s vision of a world I know intimately. Add a great story, which Armstrong does, every damn time, and I’m lost. I have to read. Everything else is on standby.

There’s a lot of pleasure to be had in any well-drawn setting, but knowing something about the world it’s based on reveals the depth of a writer’s skills. Armstrong is very, very skilled. Her prickly tough girl characters eloquently capture the conflicts and contradictions of women’s lives in such a hard, violence-prone culture. There’s a balancing act here between authenticity and the demands of narrative for identifiable, likable characters. I don’t tend to like tough girls (or boys), especially when they view fighting as just a little something they do for fun on a drunken Saturday night. I don’t hold with using alcohol to numb out real feelings. I deplore the use of violence to cow others, and the use of terror as a style of family discipline. Yet Armstrong carries me through my judgments and engages my compassion for the people doing these things.

She also reminds me why I don’t live in South Dakota now, and why I probably never will again despite the fact that there’s no place I love more on this earth. She also shows me into the hearts and spirits of the people who raised me and the people who raised them. I get a clear view of exactly where a big piece of my own fictional preoccupation with violence comes from, and why I see it in male garb more often than not. I see the awkward mix of pit bull tough, shoot-from-the-hip-and-pick-up-the-pieces-later snarkiness and deep, heartfelt concern for the welfare of others that is so ingrained in my mother and her family. I see why my Dad has always been inclined to let us women fight our own battles. I see why I don’t want to fight at all.

A little of the tension I carry at the core of me eases.

Now there’s a thrill.

And if anyone ever tries to tell me again that genre fiction isn’t as powerful or as rich as literary fiction, I’ll handcuff ‘em to a ball hitch on a crashed pickup in a March blizzard on South Dakota Highway 34 out past the Belle Fourche river and let ‘em think about that for a while. Oh, wait. That’s what one of Lori’s villains did combined with where some of my relatives lived. Never mind…


Thanks, Lori. Keep up the fine work.

Red Leather Magic

That's me in 1983. Six years old, and doing my best Michael Jackson. And that is my red (p)leather jacket. I loved the hell out of that jacket. In my mind it wasn't some flimsy knockoff plucked off a Gemco shelf. To me, that thing was magic.

When I slipped it on, I was Michael Jackson in Thriller. I could sing like him. I could dance like him.

That red jacket was my Dumbo's feather. There was no stopping me when I had it on. I channeled all the cool of my childhood hero and coupled it with the unbridled confidence that only a six year-old is capable of. I was unstoppable.

What I wouldn't give some days to have just a touch of that magic back. Though this time around I'd probably choose something other than a shiny red leather jacket as a conduit.

Summertime thrills

--by Juliet

*Big sigh.*

Things were simpler when we were kids. When I was a kid, and I wanted a thrill, I knew right where to find it: the Big Dipper at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

(For you purists out there, I know, I know, it's now called the Giant Dipper. But when I was a kid, it was the Big Dipper, and the name change didn't make it any gianter. And there's such a thing as tradition. And I'm stubborn as hell, destined to be that cranky old woman who refuses to change with the times.)

Aaaaannnyyywaaay. So. The Big Dipper. A classic wooden roller coaster built in 1924 (now a National Historic Landmark). Such thrilling awesomeness was rarely to be found on this earth, I could tell that from the start -- ever since I was too young to make the height requirement. But the thrill didn't start with standing in line with dozens of sweaty beach goers, listening to the screams and rattles and screeching.

Oh no, the thrill began small. In that niggling little voice at the back of my head: was there any way, any way at all, to talk the grown-ups into a trip to Santa Cruz? I would have to recruit my sisters to my side, of course, and we would present a united front. A birthday or some other celebratory excuse was a great ruse. Promises were made, sad eyes maintained, wistful sighs manifested. Or perhaps another friend's parents were the more likely target...I tell you, there was a lot of strategizing, on and off stage.

Would they or wouldn't they? My father claimed to hate sand, sun, crowds, and traffic, so he was a pretty tough sell. But if there was some kind of motorcycle event in town? Different story. Other parents were more reasonable, allowing the concept of actually planning a trip just for the kids...and I could usually talk my way into the back seat of the station wagon (the one that faced backwards). Later, as a teenager, there was usually an older brother or sister who could be bribed or otherwise coerced into making the schlep from Cupertino, over the hills to paradise.

And then, once you secured a ride: cash money. You needed enough for a corn dog, maybe salt water taffy, and to get as many rides on the Big Dipper as humanly possible. Me, I would go without food for the sake of another ride, but most parents were sticklers about eating at some point.

Then came the wait in the loooong line, getting jostled by all the other anxious kids, bored, hot, and uncomfortable in damp, sandy swimsuits that chafed. Wondering whether, by chance, we would have the option of the very front car and if so, would we be brave enough to take it?

Once on board, of course, the real excitement began. Careening around sharp turns in the pitch-black tunnel. And then, the very best part: emerging into the sunlight and the clicking, clackety haul to the peak of the very, very tallest hill.

The cars climb the hill slowly. Achingly so.

You finally reach the top.

A seeming pause.

A hitch of breath, hands in the air, and ---

Wooooosh!

Okay, I was a tad obsessed. One of my fondest childhood memories was when a neighbor took my to the boardwalk as payment for vacation house/dogsitting, bought me a pass with unlimited rides, and I got to go on the Big Dipper over and over and over.

And then, in what I swear was in no way connected to my roller coaster fetish, I wound up studying at UC Santa Cruz. That summer, I got a job -- again, it was pure serendipity-- at the corn dog stand that just happens to be right underneath the Big Dipper. One of the perqs of being an underpaid Boardwalk employee and dealing with hot, sweaty tourists all day? A free pass to all the rides. I kid you not.

Okay, it's true I was sharing a roach-infested "studio apartment" in a crappy converted motel which called itself, in a fit of misplaced optimism, "Aloha Court" (the other residents included a disturbed Viet Nam vet, a heroine-addicted couple, and several Mexican immigrant families who worked the fields.) I smelled like corn dogs all summer long -- a mealy, greasy aroma that permeated clothing, skin, and hair. But it was thrilling, riding that Big Dipper any time I wanted...and being out on my own. Doing what I damned well pleased. If that included eating taffy for dinner and riding the Dipper five times, then so be it.

Since then there have been other thrills in life: Seeing lightening bugs for the first time. The birth of my son. Praying the erratically driven bus didn't go over the cliff in the Philippines. Falling in love. Running into the Tour de France, completely by chance, in the Pyrenees. Trying to take care of bodily needs out in the pig corral at night in a Mexican village. A night spent in an actual castle. Selling my first book, then seeing it on the bookstore shelf.

But things get more complicated when you grow up. Not harder, necessarily, because I think childhood is hard. But definitely more complicated. Sometimes it's difficult to find a really good thrill -- at least a legal one.

Now, in one of those funny twists in life, my son is studying at UC Santa Cruz. After dropping him off at the dorms, my friend (and former corn-dog-stand co-worker) and I hopped onto the Big Dipper for old times' sake. We were the oldest people in line --by far-- but we scored the very first car!

Held our hands up, screamed, laughed, and did ourselves proud.

It was a real thrill.