Hi David - Where abouts in Northern Canada is your book set? Is it for older teens?
Brenda

I'll have to check out your book. I have to admit that I haven't read much YA fiction as I tend to read adult mysteries in my spare time. I've lately been wondering how far to push the envelope with writing for adolescents - what will publishers accept or not? I think it depends on the publisher and the author and what they are comfortable with. What do you think?
Brenda

Hi David - Thanks for adding me to your list of friends. One more question - did you visit the Arctic to write your book?
Brenda

Wow! What a nice comment. I may re-read that every morning. Little Gods sounds terrific. What are you working on now?

Hi David and thanks for the invite.
Little Gods sounds great. Good luck with it. I must look out for it.

I believe in the connection between words and music, too! Hearing, in the mind's ear, what we read and the rhythm of what we read, is an important element of literacy.

But then, I've spent most of my life in music, the rest in books. My perception is definitely biased, LOL!

Burke is an idol of mine. I recall sending a manuscript inquiry to Phil a number of years back, and he was very gracious in response, although too busy to do anything. Nice to meet you.

Hello David, just stopping by to say hello! Have a great week.


Kristine

Hi David, thank you so much for ordering a copy of Field of Darkness--especially in hardcover!

I had a comment lost yesterday too. Must be internet gnomes on strike again.

Dear David,

Can you explain your comment on my page. I don't understand!

A novelist is typically drawn to write a story based partly on the dramatic premise and additionally on the nature of the characters. Both aspect matter profoundly as to how the story ultimately plays. Spike Lee once said that if you take the same story premise and change the characters playing each role, you have an entirely different story. And he's right. Different characters bring to the story different value systems, different aversions, different preceptions about what life owes them and how easy, or difficult, it is to get it. All of that often depends upon how the characters have chosen to define their lives up to that point, which is to say how they have actually demonstrated through actions that they are in fact the characters they othewise would only imagine themselves to be. And so you (I) look for those realities which say to me, hey, that's a neat starting point because the character has, through decisions they have made, brough themselves to a stage of defintion that already engages the reader by itself alone, which then provides a kind of booster to thrust their interest into the story premise itself. Okay?

I did, and I will confess in front of the world of crime that I still don't understand, but ambiguity is the spice of life. I'm in the middle of novels, just finished one and working on plot for next, and can't seem to concentrate on much other than figuring out how to preserve a body found ten years after the murder. What is the ideal environment required to keep a body from deteriorating? Any thoughts, reference texts, etc. would be gratefully accepted. I read your bio on your website and thought you might have some ideas. I like the title "Little Gods" and from the prep school boys I've known and definitely not loved, it seems very appropriate. I hope to read it very soon. Thanks.

It's always amazing to me that folks like you who have so much going for them in terms of being attractive to readers as characters, seek other characters to engage characters' interests. That's the heart of suggesting that you are a good character. It's a complement. I've spoken at conferences with Al Zuckerman, who insists that blockbusters always deal with inaccessibly important or powerful people, when in fact his own client, Ken Follett's first, break-out novel, The Eye of the Needle, dealt with ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The trick seems not to take readers to positions they'll never be with people they don't know, but to show how people more like them -- whose names are, as with my friend actor Robert Prosky -- still 'in the book.' The real problem with writing novels about ourselves is that one may end up writing, as Ian Flemming did, about himself as a superspy. The trick is to find someone unlike yourself who is interesting. I could write interesting stuff about you, but would not want any part in the story. It's not that I wouldn't like meeting you in fact or fiction, simply that the rule 'keep yourself out of the story' is one I observe fairly rigidly. In the same way, Vonnegut waited seventeen years for emotional distance from the firebombing at Dresden to write Slaughterhouse Five. Originally he wanted a roman a clef but on reflection he turned it over to Billy Pilgrim, because the 'children's campaign' had to make sense in terms of innocence, right and wrong, etc on a scale grander than simply the personal. Anyway, bodies and preserving. Try Doug Ubelacker (sp?) at the Smithsonian. He works forensics cases, old ones and has written a book. I've talked with the guy (we share an opthamologist, Doug Greer, Robin Cook's med school pal) and he is very open to chat. In a way, he better be, since you are paying his salary. More to your exact point. If you look at Otzi, the ice man, recovered after thousands of years from a subliming glacier (sublimation takes water directly from solid ice to vapor without passing through liquid water) you find a dry mumified corpse that was well enough preserved to tell that he had been killed by an arrow to his back, and also to do DNA. Freeze drying is probably the best way to preserve as much of a body as possible. Refrigeration is less effective because slow decomposition goes on, even at tempertures just above freezing. Embalming is good, but generally involves evsicerating the body and removing the brain. Even the ancient Egyptians did this. There is also this German who works in Kazakstan and faithfully preserves 'real bodies' in the sense that all the interconnections of the original structures and tissues are replaced by a nondecomposing counterpart, but this product is to a real body as a fossil is to real bone. In fossilization the shape is exactly preserved but the calcium phosphate of bone becomes calcium silicate as the silicate replaces the phosphate in what chemists call isomorphous substitution. If you can't find Doug U's address or phone or email, let me know. He'll be speaking on an upcoming forensics seminar at the Smithsonian. I can get you times and dates if you like.

David--Thanks for reference. I will use it, but what I really need is to keep the body preserved through some natural means, no air, low temperatures, whatever. I'm beginning to think it won't work but I'll keep trying. I need another St. Bernadette, but this one is for Assisi, and more attractive than St. Chiara.

Thank you for the compliment, which seemed just a tad backhanded. If you haven't read "The Last Enemy," aren't you making assumptions based on a synopsis. If you have read it, thank you, and I'll take your criticism seriously and any others you may have. I shouldn't reveal my grasping nature publicly, but I would love to write a blockbuster (and chose the setting and characters with that in mind), since I write to supplement income and also, wishful dreaming, to find a publisher for a novel I would like to write. But even there, how many people actually read the novels of Barbara Pym or Jean Rhys, not enough, I think, to pay our heating bills in Maine. I do agree about "The Eye of the Needle," which I haven't read in a while but it's one of those novels I want to reread. I'm curious, and as a way of getting to know you, what did you think of Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian?"

Thanks. I'll work on the irradiated body idea. Have to think it through and see what I come up with but it may actually help me with some of the plotting, so much appreciated.

You're always welcome. Stay in touch. My former boss Dick Chitwood was in charge of the cersium-187 irradiation probram of DOE, so I certainly can provide answers if needed.

Let me also add that cestiuim 137 is used in food irradiation in order to, you guessed it, eliminate any bacteria that might lead to decomposition. The process is known to extend the shelf life by a factor of ten, jus as freezing is know to extend the stability of vitamins by a factor of ten.

Thanks, and this might work if this were set in Ireland, in Donegal, the peat bog capital of the world. What actually happens in plot is: in 1997 there was a major earthquake in Assisi and a number of buildings were seriously damaged. Some of them were not fixed until years later. In 2007 when a building that had been occupied by a cult is undergoing repairs, the body of a very young, very well preserved woman is discovered. The cult claims it's a miracle, that it's a young nun, a follower of St. Francis. The police have to find out who the women is, how she died (murdered), who killed her, and very important that she did not die in the 1300's. Sounds wild but I think I can make most of it work, but I need to have the woman's body found in an environment that would have helped to preserve the body naturally. I did some research on the various preserved Catholic saints and there are certain circumstances under which their bodies would have been preserved naturally--not miracles as claimed, but I don't believe any of those methods would apply to my body. I can't use any type of embalming or anything that would show that the woman was born in the 20th century (she came from a small village in Portugal--no fillings in teeth, no medical interventions that would show when she was born.

I thought perhaps if she had cancer and had whole body radiation right before she was killed, it would help preserve the body, but I believe the effects of WBR would show in an autopsy. Would you know about that, or have any other ideas.

I lost your post while typing reply. Still don't have the hang of this site. Thanks again.

Grace,
Re: radiation and effects. A People magazine article about ten years ago had a one-pager about Harold McLintock, an employee of Westinghouse working at the Hanford Nuclear Reservtion in eastern Washington. In the explosion of an Americium ion exchange column he received one hundred times the lethal dose of radiation, survived and never lost his hair. It needs noting that for radiation lethal doses are usually cited as LD50, where the fifty is a subscript and means fifty percent of an exposed population. Humans are individuals, not averages and some, like Harold McClintock, have a remarkable immune system and polymerase repair mechanism. Obviously he's near the high end of resistance to radiation, but knowing this allows you to have a corpse with full body radiation that does not lose its hair. Hope this helps.
m'

Well I'm from outside Melbourne so I'm required to avoid Sydney like the plague (which I'll happily comply with ).

I'm a country girl at heart - so being banished to the outback is my idea of a win!

Thank you for adding me as your friend. We need all the friends we can get--especially if you are a writer!

Hey, David. Look forward to reading your work. Sounds fascinating!
Syl

Thank you for adding me! When will you be in St. Louis for a signing?

Left Bank Books has given me an invite but with scheduling problems and another book in the works it has been tough to fit in. It looks like the book is going into a second edition soon, so many then. I'll keep you posted Cyndi.

Hi David,
Thank you for the invitation.
Margot

Margot,
You're most welcome. Thanks for joining 'the gang.'
David

David, We share an agent in Philip. thanks for the nice words.

Pleased to be countered among your friends. That's an interesting diverse range of books you have published. The series about the blind 'tec certainly appeals.

Tony, cobber,
I've only spent two days in Melbourne after the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Next trip down under is in 2008 to Perth. Australians are great, we loved the country and people, and look forward to more of same. One of my very oldest friends lives in Manly with his American wife, and that's a connection. More to come of my synchronities with the Antipodes. Incidentally, I read Robert Hutghes The Fatal Shore and loved it.
Best,

David

Hiya, David. Thanks for the invite. Here's pulp in your eye!

Hi. I see you like John Updike. My husband corresponds with him. He was born and raised in the area where I live. Anyway, thanks for the invite, I'm honored. I write romantic suspense, so far anyway. Cheers, Betty Ann

I am happily married to a fantastic Jewish lady, for which you may either kiss me or kill me. And yes, a rabbi did marry us. For which you may either kiss him or kill him.
Best,
David

Reading your thoughtful note, I wonder into apparent parallels in our stories, beyond a common love for crime-fiction or true-crime—noting that my wife is fantastic and Jewish and a rabbi did that ceremony. As an admirer and hopeful friend, it would be my honor to choose the former regarding the first choice; as a rabbi myself, the latter may be more appropriate regarding choice number two. Best of luck. Stay in touch.

Maybe this is what this site is for, but I have a terrific idea for a novel set in the early fifties about a former German Jewish athlete, (there were many, including Olympic medal winners) and mountaineers who survives a Nazi mass extermination and burial in the Ukraine, adventures his way out of that, ends up in Israel in the early days and is 'arranged' into a group of Swiss climbers going for Everest in which a former Nazi is trying to recreate himself, but has been ID'd and targeted by a very young Mossad. As the Swiss did mount an assault on Everest the year before and after Hillary's, it's possible. Working title HIGH CRIMES, but -- alas -- one of the things needed is a street map of Tel Aviv, circa 1952, and I've had no luck f inding one. And yes, I fear some of this ground may have been gone over by the film WALK ON WATER, but in the 1952 time framework there is more immediacy, intensity of emotion, personal memories and feelings. Of course, if this goes as a film, Mel Gibson will not be the producer, even if he wants to be.

Hi David,
Good idea! And I like the idea of Lanai, too. I'm working on a mystery now that takes place on Maui, and would love to go to Lanai to do that research! There are so many wonderful things here in the islands to work into mysteries. My latest, FIRE PRAYER, takes place on Molokai, which is a very small, insular community--and a very Hawaiian community, rife with legends and folklore, which I couldn't resist weaving into the plot. It's not what I'd call a "closed door" mystery, but the reader knows right away it has to be a local--and to what extent to others protect their own??
Thanks for the input--and keep in touch, okay? Hope you come visit your brother soon.
Aloha, Debby

P.S. I noticed that we like a lot of the same authors and movies--similar tastes!

Thanks for the invite, David.

He he. Thanks, David. It's a good feeling, and I'm glad everyone likes the place so much. I'll look into your friends issue sometime later as I'm at work.

Cheers,
Daniel

David, Thanks for the invitation. Someday I'll have to tell you why I hate the DC subway system!

Thanks for the invite, David. The book idea sounds like a winner. And as for the street map of Tel Aviv c. 1952: if no one can find one, who's going to complain if you just make stuff up?

OH, so I don't have to tell you! I thought they only hated lost, forlorn tourists looking for Malice Domestic!

Thank you for the recommandation!

Thanks, David. Did you know I grew up in DC? About a block from the old Shoreham hotel... what are you doing there?

Yes... I left for all the reasons you'd expect, but my family is still there so I come back regularly. And 3 of my closest friends still live there as well. I used to work at NBC, TVN, and PBS...before I saw the light. It was actually more of a jaded feeling that wouldnt go away. Chicago is great... real graft, real corruption... and never boring.

Chicago's so great a city that I chose it as the setting for my Spike Halleck novels. Those novels were so good that the producers of The Fugitive pirated five scenes almost unchanged for the picture (you'll remember that The Fugitive was set in Chicago.) i FO0)you'ePiratedGu hata ch

Pardon the fragmented previous message. COmputers do funny things when my magic fingers dance on the keyboard. More on Chicago. Daughter went to U of C and loved it. What can you say of a school that graduated by Hugh Hefner and Eliot Ness. Balance, no? I'm hoping to write a few more Chicago novels and avoid the fate of Guy Izzi. When you were with NBC, was that on their Nebraska Avenue facilty (now next to Homeland Security.)?

Thanks David, I'll send you an email than. I hope things are going well for you. I haven't talked to you in awhile. Actually I haven't been on the site for awhile. Hopefully I will be when things settle down a bit.
Kristine

Hi David, if you get this message before you are off to the Great Exploration, I wish you lots of fun! The Grand Canyon is just amazing... I think you can ride horses down a pathway, perhaps not now because of the weather?

Take care of yourself on your journey and don't get lost! lol Write me when you return!

Kristine =)

Hello David,
More Chicago novels? Great and a place where people vote early and often, as Libby says. Thanks for inviting me!

Hi David, I was going through all my comments and realized I never responded. Sorry. I agree that interactions here can be short. Well, I wanted to say thanks for becoming my friend.

Hi David,

Thanks for the add. =)