2023—Let It Be

Like all years, 2023 held the good and the bad. For me, the scale tipped more toward the bad side, but thankfully, most of that is well behind me. I have much to celebrate today, my 35th wedding anniversary, so let me reminisce.

Photo by Qui Nguyen at unsplash.com

Why a picture of coral? Symbolizing longevity and success, coral represents the 35th anniversary. Neither plant nor rock, coral is animal, an invertebrate that can live for hundreds, even thousands, of years! A sign that these beautiful old fossils and their strong union will last nearly into eternity.

 

Oops, those aren’t the old fossils but the young cuties in 1987 and 1988, respectively. These are fuzzy stills taken from the video interviews we did at the dating club where we met, then known as American Millionaires International (“AMI”) on West 57th Street in Manhattan. No, we weren’t millionaires or anywhere close, even further from that mark after AMI took a big chunk of our money in membership fees! Worth it, though, right? The people at AMI eventually realized the name was a little off-putting and changed it to “Invitations.”

For those of you in the dating app click-and-swipe generation, here’s how the antiquated system worked in the 80s. I filled out a two-sided, single-page questionnaire with basic info and still photos, what AMI called the “Perfect Match Profile.” I’d go there and leaf through the binders of profiles, find the ones I liked, and ask to see the corresponding videos with scintillating questions like, “What’s your idea of a romantic date?” and “Where do you see yourself in five years?” If I liked a video, AMI would snail mail a postcard to my chosen one, asking him to come in and look at my profile and video. If it’s a “yes” from him, AMI snailed me a postcard with his phone number. It was up to me, the initial chooser, to call the amenable chosen one. If someone chose me first, it would go the other way around. Don’t think I had too many of those.

What a process! Had to be patient in those days.

I’d been in the club for a year and had about eight dates before meeting Kevin. He was new, and I was his first, occasioning his tongue-in-cheek comment that he didn’t get his money’s worth on the exciting dating scene. I told him, “You lucked out big time.” The eight dates I had were painfully awkward. My favorite was the guy who had a fantasy of driving me to the restaurant on the back of his motorcycle. On the phone I said, no way, I’ll meet you outside and we’ll take a cab. He showed up at my building with his motorcycle anyway. On the intercom, I nixed the motorcycle ride again and refused to open the door so he could leave his helmet in my apartment. When we got back from the date, his helmet was no longer dangling from the handlebars.

Six months to the day after our first date at Windows on the World, Kevin proposed—also at Windows on the World. I could guess what was coming as he nervously whispered his practice lines. So could the party of four sitting at the next table. Before Kevin could take out the ring box, one of the men blurted in a Texas accent, loud enough for us to hear, “I think he’s going to propose!” It was a “yes” from me, of course, uttered shyly to Kevin as he put the diamond on my finger, with my back partially turned to that boisterous (drunk?) group.

Soon after, we went back to AMI and politely demanded our profiles and videos as keepsakes. When they found out we were engaged, the cry went out, “Engagement here!” Three or four startled singles in the library looked up from the profile books and started clapping. AMI agreed to release our profiles and videos only after shaking us down for a Member Profile Interview to publish in their newsletter. The writer got creative and colorful in exaggerating our respective career titles and “quoting” our remarks about the fabulous AMI system.

And the rest is history.

I owe Kevin, as well as other family members and friends, my gratitude in helping me through my 2023 health setback. Chemo, surgery, and most side effects are now out of the way with complete success, so it’s full speed ahead with good health in the New Year! I had to quit teaching dance for several months, but I’m back now and looking forward to teaching many adult classes in 2024.

This photo with some of my students at Scarsdale Ballet Studio was taken in February before I went on break. I danced at home during this period to try and keep in shape.

 

Here is a still from a short piece of choreography I recorded in July, pre-surgery. You can watch it here on YouTube.

 

The writing life continues. Had a lot of fun appearing on the Voice of Indie podcast in August. You can hear it here. The two hosts, Beem Weeks and Stephen Geez, are excellent writers with interesting books I recommend.

Didn’t get anything published in 2023 but wrote a few stories and I’m close to finishing a book-length collection of short fiction. Murderous Ink Press will be publishing my story, “A Father’s Duty,” in one of their 2024 anthologies. I’m most excited about my new novel, Indelicate Deception, a character-driven family drama with an element of suspense and social thematic underpinnings. Although one of the characters is a lawyer, the novel is a far departure from my Dana Hargrove suspense novels. I finished the first draft early in the year, polished it, and am sending out queries to literary agents. Wish me luck trying to get this book out to the world sooner than later!

Dear friends, here’s to health, happiness, and peace in 2024 and beyond,

Vija

Summer eBook Sale

 

Just a quick note to let you know about this!

Summer 2022 is the time to pick up the first 5 Dana Hargrove novels in ebook.

Less than a buck each, marked down from $4.99.

Tell your friends!

Here are the links for my author pages at these booksellers:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Apple iBooks

Kobo

Here’s the sale schedule!!»»»»»»

 

 

“Informed, thrilling action in and out of the courtroom, and few can portray it better than V.S. Kemanis. Highly recommended.”  — The San Francisco Review of Books 

 

 

 

The Summer Before the War: Book Review and Conversation with Helen Simonson

For this installment of Fiction Favorites and Awesome Authors I share with you an outstanding read by the bestselling author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson.

Her second novel, The Summer Before the War, set in the idyllic English town of Rye in 1914, is beautifully written and meticulously researched. Much of the tale is a social comedy of manners, an insightful, if subtle, exploration of gender and class, full of wit, humorous dialogue, and masterful characterization. The traditions and biases of the upper middle-class are juxtaposed tellingly against those of the servant classes, Gypsies, a spinster schoolteacher, and impoverished war refugees from Belgium.

In 1914, gender equality is advancing in baby steps. Simonson aptly illustrates the status of women with several well-drawn characters, most prominently Agatha Kent and Beatrice Nash. The indomitable Agatha, married to a well-respected civil servant, is one of two women on the local school board. She takes the revolutionary step of seeking the board’s approval to hire a woman, Beatrice Nash, as Latin instructor. Beatrice is an independent woman in her early twenties, nearly penniless after her father’s death, unable to make ends meet on a meager inheritance controlled by patronizing trustees. The teacher position is bread and butter to Beatrice, but this reality clashes with Agatha’s tenuous position in recommending her. Agatha warns, “let’s not mention any such awkward necessity” as money when seeking board approval—better to emphasize “teaching as a service rather than a profession.”

Another “awkward” subject is Beatrice’s desire to become a published writer. Agatha tells her to keep this yearning under wraps because it would be “an absolute disaster for a lady in your position to earn a reputation as a bohemian.” Beatrice has no trouble following this advice the first time she’s introduced to Mr. Tillingham, a renowned novelist in Agatha’s social circle. When the subject of female writers comes up, the arrogant and pompous author says he has received “several slightly hysterical requests to read such charming manuscripts” and “would rather cut off my right hand” than read them. He gives the manuscripts to his secretary “to compose her own diplomatic replies and to consign the offending pages to the kitchen stove.” Later on, a publisher sends Beatrice a condescending missive, rejecting her proposal to publish an analysis of her father’s work. Ironically, the publisher has decided to commission Mr. Tillingham for the project!

Agatha is childless but is close to her two nephews, Hugh Grange, a young surgeon, and Daniel Bookham, a poet. Growing up, the cousins spent summers and school holidays in the Kent household. Their chosen professions foreshadow later events during the war. In these characters, we see the personal turmoil wrought by social convention and judgment: in Daniel’s case, discrimination against homosexuality, and in both characters, the pressure to forge marital unions based on class and status rather than love and compatibility. The relationships between the cousins and with their Aunt Agatha are the highlights of the novel, believable and emotionally compelling.

In the first part of the novel, the townspeople live in polite denial of impending war, as hints and irony foreshadow tragic events on the horizon. When spoken of, the war is romanticized as a great adventure. The son of a nobleman joins the Royal Flying Corps because he doesn’t want to enlist in “an ordinary war” and thinks that flying airplanes is “damned good fun!” To complete his image, he shops at Burberry’s because “they do a very good aviator helmet with goggles.” Marriageable young women launch a recruitment brigade, shaming any reluctant young man into enlisting by handing him a white feather (symbol of cowardice), along with a subtle bit of sexual bribery: no offer of marriage will be accepted unless the man is marching off to war. For a proper sendoff, the town hosts a parade with a brass band, displays “model trenches” on the fairgrounds, and tops it off with a grand ball.

The last part of the novel takes us to the front, into the real trenches and a battleground hospital. A strength of the narrative lies in the gradual loss of innocence of the main characters, the contrast between the naivety of their grandiose expressions of patriotism and the tragic reality they ultimately experience. The novel also touches on divided loyalties of family and nationality when the German husband of a British woman is called home for military service. This is an intriguing theme that is so wonderfully explored in William Burton McCormick’s book, Lenin’s Harem, which I reviewed here on VBlog.

Fans of historical fiction are sure to love Simonson’s sweeping novel full of colorful characters, scintillating dialogue, and insightful exploration of relationships during an era of great social change. In this video [click here], the author aptly sums up the major theme: the book is ultimately about “what you think is important to build in your lives, what remains when everything is falling apart, and more specifically, what is destroyed by war and what is burnished in the fire.”

And now, I welcome Helen Simonson to VBlog. Thank you for joining me, Helen! I loved The Summer Before the War, and Major Pettigrew is now on my ‘to-read’ list.

From a writer’s perspective, I have a few questions I’m dying to ask you, especially because our writing processes are apparently so different. In your videotaped presentation, you mentioned, “I don’t write what I know—I write to ask questions and explore them and hope to find some answers for myself.” The historical setting for your characters required painstaking research, yet an intuitive knowledge of human nature and social interaction underlies your characterizations. Do you feel that you write what you “know” on an emotional or personal level?

I try to write about the characters in my head and they seem to be real people to me.  What is funny is that on an emotional level I can see that I am using my characters to work out things that puzzle me about the world and about how we treat each other. Social comedy as moral philosophy?  I do also have great fun slipping in small personal details—like my grandfather’s name or a house I’d like to own in Sussex—but I am not writing autobiographically. I think books are wonderful because they allow us to travel to places we cannot go.  Writing a book is no different; every page is a new adventure for me.

You also mentioned that you don’t write an outline of the story first but create the characters and let them lead you where they want to go. Did you have a broad sense of the plot when you started out, or was this story a complete adventure of discovery along the way?

Simply following the characters around is a frightening way to write a work as long as a novel.  But now I’m in the midst of a third novel I have no idea where I’m going—again!  With The Summer Before the War, I knew World War I was coming but I did not know how we were going to go there.  It was a great relief to realize my surgeon, Hugh, would go and I could simply follow him to the hospitals and trenches of the Western Front.  I don’t recommend my way of writing but it forces one to noodle about, leaving room for literary themes to arise and be explored.  If I had a plot outline I’m afraid I might rush along too fast.

I wonder if you can place yourself in Beatrice’s shoes and imagine what it might have been like to face the prejudice against female writers, as depicted by the character Mr. Tillingham and the publisher that rejected her project. Given your evident talent and love of writing, do you think you would have been daunted in such an environment or would have persevered?

The more I wrote about Beatrice the more I wondered if we have really come as far as we thought in terms of women being free and equal.  The pay gap and the #metoo movement suggest we are still fighting for basic respect.  I would have been daunted then and I’m still daunted now.  No writer I know has escaped rejection, and since writing is an act of great vulnerability it can be very painful.  It was not hard to imagine Beatrice’s hurt.  Just the term ‘female writer’ carries its own put-down.  I was thrilled to discover, in taking intermediate French conversation lessons recently, that the French word for writer doesn’t carry a pronoun.  There is no ‘le’ or ‘la’ so in French I am fully a writer—Je suis écrivain.  It feels good!

And it feels good to read your work! Thank you for this insight into your writing, Helen. We look forward to your next novel!

New Release: Deep Zero

I’d like to share with you some photos I took today of ice floes on the Hudson River. These are fitting illustrations for my new legal suspense novel featuring prosecutor Dana Hargrove.
What lurks here? Deep Zero.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve had a great week visiting many fabulous authors and bloggers.

Thank you Art Taylor for hosting me on SleuthSayers, the site for Professional Crime-Writers and Crime-Fighters, where I talk about the Dana Hargrove novels and writing legal suspense.

I shared hot cocoa and good conversation about Deep Zero with Linda Hill on “Staying in with…” on Linda’s Book Bag.

Deep Zero was featured on Indie Crime Scene and included on the new releases page of Dru’s Book Musings.

Author Connie Johnson Hambley invited me for a return visit to her outstanding blog, Out of the Fog, where I offer my reflections on how far the Dana Hargrove series has come.

Got some nice words about Deep Zero from reviewers on NetGalley, Mystery Sequels, and The U.S. Review of Books.

Thanks to all of these wonderful authors, bloggers, and reviewers, and extra thanks to fabulous cover artists, Roy Migabon and Eeva Lancaster.

Now…time to write a few short stories before brainstorming about the next Dana Hargrove novel…

The Dana Hargrove Novels: Author Video

Thanks to talented filmmaker Blake Horn for producing a short video, filmed in my home, about my inspiration for the novels featuring prosecutor Dana Hargrove.

Blake Horn at work.

 

Click the link below to watch the video on YouTube:

The Dana Hargrove Novels

The fourth standalone Dana Hargrove novel, Deep Zero, will be here soon!

Legal Eagles: Attorneys Writing Fiction (2)

Re-blogging here an entry from the Kirkus blog by editor Myra Forsberg, entitled “Legal Eagles”!

“Through the ages, the works of playwrights, novelists, and filmmakers, from Shakespeare to Steven Spielberg, have gleefully skewered lawyers. In Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, the first movie in the popular franchise, a discerning dinosaur chomps on a particularly sleazy attorney, delighting fans worldwide. But depictions of heroic lawyers also remain plentiful, particularly on TV, in classic series (Perry Mason) and more recent fare (The Good Wife).

Forsaken Oath“Kirkus recently reviewed three legal thrillers that focus on resourceful attorneys pursuing justice. In V.S. Kemanis’ Forsaken Oath, Manhattan prosecutor Dana Hargrove finds herself embroiled in three cases, including the murder of a fashion designer. In this page-turner, she must uncover the truth and save her career. “The author manages to compellingly depict many distinct areas of the justice system, from the cops on the street to the lawyers on both sides of the courtroom,” our reviewer writes. Jerri Blair’s Black and White, set in 1979,follows Florida public defender J.T. Lockman, who takes the case of an African-American accused of murdering a white car dealer. J.T. believes a Ku Klux Klansman committed the crime but must gather the evidence to prove it. Our critic calls the novel an “energetic tale that’s rife with drama and mystery.” A sinister figure kidnaps teenage girls in Brian Clary’s Amicus Curiae: the daughter of Texas attorney Michelle “Mickey” Grant disappears and the police soon arrest Willie Lee Flynn for one abductee’s murder. Although he’s convicted, Mickey harbors doubts and files an amicus curiae brief, seeking to retry Flynn and discover her daughter’s whereabouts. Our reviewer says, “Fans of crime dramas will find Clary’s suspenseful yarn a welcome addition to the genre.”

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Stay tuned for the third installment of Legal Eagles! I’m currently reading a great legal thriller by attorney Manuel Ramos, soon to be reviewed.

Reflections on the 75th Anniversary of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

On a dismal, drizzly afternoon in Manhattan, an array of editors, authors, artists, and crime fiction aficionados jammed a large meeting room at the Butler Library to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.  Appropriate to the occasion were several surprise visits from beyond the grave (an eerie, other-worldly screeching from the HVAC system), and a chilling reading by Joyce Carol Oates from her story “Big Momma,” a creepy tale from The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror.  Shivers!
ellery_queens_mystery_jco

In a publishing environment where magazines and journals of short fiction easily come and go, EQMM can be proud of its longevity. The secret (or mystery) of this success was one of the topics explored during the afternoon of panel discussions by notable authors and editors.  Some shared fascinating personal experiences about working with the founders of the magazine, the cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, who collaborated as Ellery Queen. The distinguished panelists included Otto Penzler (proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop and founder of The Mysterious Press), Sarah Weinman (author, editor, and expert on women crime fiction writers), Jeffrey Marks (biographer of Anthony Boucher, at work on a biography of Dannay and Lee), Russell Atwood (ftomrobertsormer managing editor of EQMM), and award-winning authors Jonathan Santlofer, Joseph Goodrich, Josh Pachter, and Charles Ardai.

Especially fun was the slide show of several EQMM covers from different eras of the magazine, along with interior black-and-white illustrations of the stories. Janet Salter Rosenberg, the daughter of cover designer George Salter, gave insight into her father’s creations. Artists Laurie Harden and Tom Roberts discussed their respective works and their appreciation of the artistic freedom EQMM affords them in bringing their visions of the stories to life. Here is an evocative cover by Roberts from the July 2011 issue. The cover for the very first issue, and a clever story about it by Arthur Vidro, can be found on the EQMM blog, Something is Going to Happen, posted on August 31.

The symposium was capped by our trip up to the sixth floor, enticed by the promise of a glass of wine and (the real inducement) an exhibit of EQMM artifacts displayed in a small alcove of the rare book and manuscript library. Of particular interest to me were the yellowing pages of manuscripts, typed out on an old Remington or some such, with Dannay’s edits marked in pencil. Those of you who know of my life as an editor will guess at my delight in seeing Dannay’s flourishes and variances of the universal copyediting symbols and his spot-on word choices!  The exhibit is on display through December 23.

Why has EQMM endured?  The panelists and current editor Janet Hutchings agreed on a few key ingredients: a commitment to quality and a wide variety of stories of different styles within the mystery genre.  Wait a minute:  I’m going to ban that word “genre”!  It’s thrown around far too often and stirs up preconceptions that limit a reader’s horizons.  As an author who resists a pigeonhole for her own work, I would do the same for EQMM, unless you take the most expansive view of the term “mystery” as an essential element of compelling writing.  As stated on EQMM’s website, when founders Dannay and Lee were “deciding how to orieeqmmallnationsnt their new magazine, there could not have been any question that its outlook would be global. Both men had cosmopolitan tastes and a knowledge of world literature. It has become part of EQMM lore that Dannay, who soon took over the editing of the magazine, aimed to prove, in its pages, that every great writer in history had written at least one story that could be considered a mystery.”

Jeffrey Marks notes in his essay in the September/October issue that EQMM has published such literary luminaries as William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Twain, and E.M. Forster, as well as several Pulitzer winners.  This year, in the May issue, we were treated to a reprint of Borges’ iconic story exploring alternate realities, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which was originally published in EQMM in 1948.

Another masterpiece, Stanley Ellin’s “The Specialty of the House,” is reprinted in the current issue. Beyond these prize reprints, the range of writing that appears monthly in EQMM’s pages includes something for everyone, whether light or dark, police procedural or private eye, cozy or locked room. My taste runs to stories of psychological suspense and intellectual challenge, and I can always find them here. Janet Hutchings has maintained Dannay and Lee’s expansive vision for the magazine and the tradition of high quality. I’m grateful that my own writing, which bears absolutely no resemblance to Agatha Christie’s, has been printed in two issues of EQMM eqmm_sept-oct2013and its e-book anthology, The Crooked Road Volume 3.  I’m also fortunate to have been welcomed into this community of amazing authors. As one of the panelists noted, mystery and crime writers are a really nice bunch of people because we’ve transferred every bit of aggression and nastiness to our fictional characters!

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Slightly off-topic, on the subject of anniversaries, I note here that October 26 marks a milestone for me.  A year ago, the print editions of my first two novels, Thursday’s List and Homicide Chart, were released.  To help celebrate, I’m running giveaways for signed copies of the two novels on Goodreads.  Be sure to enter for a chance to win!

Q & A with Mystery Sequels

Answering questions from reviewers and bloggers is a great opportunity for me to reflect on why I write and how I feel about my characters. Here is a link to my interview with Marika from Mystery Sequels, a site for “Everything Crime with a Sequel: Crime Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Thrillers.” I always enjoy her down-to-earth reviews and recommendations for great mystery reads. And in the midst of answering her questions, I came to realize how I’ve grown attached to my protagonist, Dana Hargrove!

Countdown to April 30, when Forsaken Oath is released to the world! Mystery Sequels gives it 5 Stars. Forsaken Oath “really shines”!