April 14, 2014
Nancy’s blog is on Easter break. It will return April 21.
“Whether you’re a six-footer or you top off at five feet, ["Tall"] is a reminder that how you measure yourself is more of a determiner of your success and well-being than any measure on a yardstick.”
– Judy Goldman
. . . . .
“Nancy Stancill takes readers on a grand adventure, from her early life as a painfully shy, 6-foot teenager, to a kickass reporter who learned that height can be power.”
– Cindy Montgomery
By
April 14, 2014
Nancy’s blog is on Easter break. It will return April 21.
By
April 7, 2014
I went to the San Antonio Book Festival over the weekend to sign books at the booth of my publisher, Black Rose Writing. There were lots of reasons to go – my publisher asked, I have friends in the area, and San Antonio is one of my all-time favorite cities. Despite the cold, damp weather, I had a great time.
Selling books in a booth at a festival requires frenetic activity. You can’t just sit and smile. Like most writers, I’m a bit of an introvert. But when you’re interspersed among dozens of other writers and booksellers, you practically have to grab passersby by the lapels to get their attention.
My colleague, who was pushing his children’s book, got lots of moms and kids leafing through the beautiful illustrations. A novel is a tougher sell – people are much more uncertain if they’ll like it. I offered miniature chocolate bars and lollipops to folks. Since most people are polite, they’d listen to my quick pitch if they took a piece of candy. I described Saving Texas as a mystery featuring a newspaper reporter and a secessionist candidate for governor. I went into more detail if they seemed receptive. Set in Houston, San Antonio and West Texas! A love triangle, sex and killings! Only $16.95!
What you can’t tell buyers is how the book swallowed three years of your life. How you sat in a drafty kitchen on dreary London mornings and tried to write every day. How your characters overloaded your brain even while you swam laps in the local pool. How you wrote 60 e-mails to agents and book publishers who didn’t even bother to answer. How you finally found one perceptive soul who liked it. How solid and silky that first copy felt in your hands. Only $16.95? Priceless!
By
March 31, 2014
Last week, a big story dropped into the laps of Charlotte journalists when Mayor Patrick Cannon was arrested on corruption charges. It was the best kind of big story because it wasn’t a catastrophe. Nobody got killed, so there weren’t any sad interviews with grieving relatives. Bad behavior by a top politician even has a certain cachet this year, as evidenced by the popularity of American Hustle. The big story had some former reporters for the Charlotte Observer waxing nostalgic on Facebook about those special days in the newsroom.
I asked myself if I missed the days when a big story broke. The answer: Hell, no! In more than three decades in big newsrooms, I lived through so many big stories as a reporter and later as an editor. They started out exciting, quickly escalated to grueling and reached a zenith of never-ending. A big story that got covered pretty thoroughly on the first and second days in print went on ad nauseum, as the bosses ramped up pressure for bigger and sexier angles. The big story never dies – it never even fades away.
I feel exhausted just reminiscing about it. But I wouldn’t mind being the good fairy of the big story. I’d be in the newsroom, invisible, enjoying the inside details and the late-night pizza. I’d perch on the reporter’s shoulder, hoping that all the sources would return her calls, that she’d get a killer quote for her second paragraph and that she’d make her deadlines for print and online. I’d spray some fairy dust on the copyeditor to catch all of her errors and to come up with the perfect page-one headline. I’d counsel patience for the top editors, to remember that nothing ever reaches perfection and that the staff works really, really hard. Best of all, I wouldn’t have to hang around for days when the story gets old and boring.
By
March 24, 2014
Growing up, I looked forward to having children who would share my love of reading. I pictured myself reading Little Women to three rapt little girls, perhaps wearing smocked dresses in contrasting shades of pink and green.
But as most new parents learn, our offspring make monkeys of us and our rose-colored expectations. I had one boy. No pink smocked dresses would ever beckon, but I looked forward to reading adventures with the kid. I loved reading to Jeff the preschooler and buying classic books for him. At 4, I was thrilled when he began sounding out words in Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop. I rejoiced that I had a reader.
But as he started riding bikes and playing sports with the neighborhood kids, I noticed that the physical life was taking over. One rainy day during summer vacation, I remember asking the 8-year-old why he wasn’t reading a book. Jeff looked up at me innocently with his big dark eyes and explained it. “Mom, when you read, nothing moves.”
I still enjoyed reading to him at bedtime and usually picked out books that I’d loved at the same age. I got about halfway through Little Men, Louisa May Alcott’s sequel to Little Women, before he began to rebel. He found the saga of life at a boys’ school far too old-fashioned. Not much moved.
I still tried. When I was 14, I had loved the rebellious spirit of The Catcher in the Rye, so I recommended it to my own teenager. He was unimpressed. But about the same time, something wonderful happened. An older cousin mailed him a bunch of paperback science fiction novels, including Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Jeff was hooked and started doing with science fiction what I’d done all my life – reading himself to sleep with a good book. I’d gotten the genre wrong, but he found his way to the books that spoke to him. Now he’s a scientist – a microbiologist – and still reading.
By
March 17, 2014
I just finished a classic mystery novel that got me thinking about villains we love to hate. The novel, In a Lonely Place, written in 1947 by Dorothy B. Hughes, is a corker. Though it was written before I was born, it feels as contemporary as the latest version of the iPhone, as suspenseful as an episode of True Detective.
In a Lonely Place was one of the first mysteries ever written from the criminal’s point of view, according to ImPress, which reprinted it in a series called “The Best Mysteries of All Time.” Hughes wrote it in a spare, hard-boiled style known as noir, more commonly used by male writers of her time.
Dix Steele, the novel’s antihero, is chilling from the first page. He’s standing on a Southern California cliff, exhilarated by the beauty of the evening fog rolling in. What does he do with this feeling? He looks for a woman to strangle. He follows a would-be victim, but she escapes – this time. We learn that Dix, a young, attractive man who was a pilot in World War II, is restless and damaged, with a Dark Secret.
He runs into a war buddy, who he finds, to his consternation, is now an L.A. detective with a beautiful, discerning wife. Eventually they will play a key role in his unmasking, but not until the reader has been thoroughly gripped by 222 pages of riveting suspense. The book, written tightly inside the serial killer’s point of view, is irresistible.
Why are we so fascinated by a protagonist like Dix? And what makes some villains better than others? My novel, Saving Texas, features three major villains. Two are men who are brought down by their corrupt use of money and power. The third is a bisexual Peruvian woman with a sordid past who loves to kill. She’s a cold assassin who happily wreaks vengeance on men, but feels remorseful after killing a woman. For some reason, my readers generally enjoyed this character more than any other in the book. Like Dix, she’s a killer with outsize appetites, but she somehow remains appealing. As a veteran reader and a novice novelist, I’m still trying to figure this out.