Author: fhd@mytypewriter.site

In mysteries, the protagonist spends the bulk of the novel uncovering secrets, and one of them is usually a motive for murder. But in commercial fiction, secrets add to the tension whether or not there’s a murder.

Ann Napolitano does this to beautiful effect in her novel, Hello Beautiful. One of her major characters, William Waters, is a morass of secrets, so much so that at one point a therapist tells him to make a list of all of them. Early in the novel, William’s parents give him a check for $10,000. He doesn’t spend it, but neither does he tell his wife about it. I knew the moment I read about that check that his wife was going to find out about it, and probably in the worst way possible. It kept me turning the pages.

What secrets do your characters have?

You don’t get much more high stakes than life and death. Mysteries usually involve a murder. That’s what makes them so exciting.

But you don’t need for a killer to be on the loose to have a high stakes novel. Kristin Hannah is a great example of a commercial novelist who knows how to raise the stakes. Tension is built into the very settings she uses: Vietnam, the Dust Bowl, Nazi-occupied France.

Even an ordinary life in Chicago can be ensnared by high stakes situations, as Ann Napolitano shows in Hello Beautiful. Charlie is the father of the four Padavano sisters who are the core of the novel. When he dies suddenly, his wife’s response is so extreme that it threatens the very unity of the family. Napolitano takes emotions that are universal, such as grief and love, and then she turns up the stakes to an almost operatic level.

How can you turn up the heat in your novel? How can you make a bad situation worse?

Mystery novels can involve terrible tragedies and disturbing crimes. But at the end, the murderer is uncovered, some semblance of order is restored and usually, the good guys win. Good triumphs over evil. It’s inspiring.

There’s definitely a bias in commercial fiction toward a happy ending. I used to work with an editor at a pitch conference, and the first thing he would ask writers was, is there a happy ending? If the writer said no, he’d swear and then he’d ask, why?

I’ve loved plenty of novels with unhappy endings. Thank you, Anna Karenina, but I do think you want the reader to feel like, having gone on a long journey with your characters, they’ve come to some sort of destination and they’ve learned something. It could be: Love matters. Family matters. There are good people in the world. You’re not the only one with issues. It might also be, Nothing means anything. I just feel like the reader should be slightly changed from having read your novel.

What do you want readers to take away?

One of the most important things I learned as a mystery writer is that people love reading mysteries. Using their characteristics in your own writing, mystery or not, will make your story more vibrant.

Yes, absinthe is known as la Fée Verte, or the Green Fairy, but the color palette is not so simple. The original and best-known version of the drink—absinthe verte—is arguably green-ish in its undiluted form, though the shade is usually more like a dull yellow-green, closer to dark khaki than olive. In any case, a quality absinthe verte is never a bright neon green. Aficionados admiringly use the term “dead leaves” to describe the color of their favorite drinks, but they never mention Kermit the Frog.

In addition, 95 years of Swiss bootlegging made the clear version of the drink—historically known as absinthe blanche and now generally referred to as absinthe bleue—much more common. That drink looks like gin or vodka for a reason: Both of those spirits were legal, while absinthe was banned.

Once diluted, however, both the verte and bleue versions of the drink are mostly milky-white in color, due to the louche effect formed by the emulsion of water and essential oils from anise and other herbs in the drink. Even the recently developed reddish version, absinthe rouge, more closely resembles Assam tea with slightly too much milk once it has been properly diluted with water for serving.

Absinthe certainly found its greatest popularity in Paris, from the middle of the 19th century until the drink was banned at the start of World War I. In fact, the drink was a foreign import, originally invented in a remote Swiss valley known as the Val-de-Travers, just outside of Neuchâtel. It was here that the nascent absinthe industry got its start in the late 18th century before soon moving across the border for tax purposes.

After marrying into an absinthe-distilling family in the Val-de-Travers, in 1805 Henri-Louis Pernod founded a distillery in the French village of Pontarlier, where he could originally produce about 16 liters—or roughly 16 quarts—of la Fée Verte per day. By the end of the 19th century, Pontarlier was the center of absinthe production, home to some 25 distilleries which collectively turned out more than 10 million liters of absinthe annually.

The Swiss vs. French distinction isn’t just historical. Today, 20 years after the drink was re-legalized in Switzerland, the Val-de-Travers is home to the largest concentration of artisanal absinthe producers in the world, as well as absinthe festivals and an excellent museum of absinthe history. If the Green Fairy has a true home, it’s in Switzerland.

The movement to ban absinthe very nearly went global, starting in Belgium in 1906, Switzerland in 1908, the Netherlands in 1909, and France in 1914. Even before Prohibition ixnayed most types of alcohol in 1920, the U.S. banned absinthe in 1912. In the 1920s, an international prohibition against the spirit was reportedly debated at the League of Nations.

Some countries never formally prohibited absinthe, however. Most conspicuously, limited absinthe continued from the 1930s through the 1960s under the Pernod brand in Tarragona, Spain. Perhaps because the United Kingdom had never really developed a taste for the Green Fairy, it was apparently never formally prohibited there. And because Czechoslovakia didn’t exist as a country until after World War I, there was no law on the books to stop Czech distillers from producing their own absinthe after the Velvet Revolution of 1989—thus kicking off the modern absinthe renaissance.

Czech distillers making dubious versions of the Green Fairy helped create an absinthe boom in the UK at the end of the 1990s. But in the drink’s Swiss homeland, Val-de-Travers bootleggers kept turning out illicit absinthe throughout the national prohibition on the drink that lasted from 1910 to 2005, improving their recipes thanks to the greater availability of herbs and spices sold in local pharmacies as “tisanes,” or herbal teas.

Frequent raids on distillers and sellers led to a cottage industry of clandestine production, as well as the popularity of the clear absinthe bleue style, which could be easily disguised as non-contraband gin or vodka. Sometimes, distillers even packaged bootleg absinthe as canned vegetables, or labeled it as “Machine Oil — For Internal Use Only.”

It’s hard to believe, but real bottles of historic absinthe—known by absinthe collectors as “pre-ban”—are still out there, occasionally showing up at auction or in estate sales. And yes, there are some scammers who are trying to cash in on the interest: That’s what The Absinthe Forger is about, after all.

So by all means, be cautious. But if you have the chance to taste an authentic pre-ban, sold by a reputable dealer like the ones I interviewed for my book, jump on it. When it comes to absinthe that dates from before World War I, they’re certainly not making any more of it.

At the final count, I might find myself with 6,000 words-plus of material, which I then have to deconstruct and decide what to cut and what to keep. On the flip side, other times I don’t have enough material, and the feature might finish a few hundred words short. In those situations I need to get creative and bulk things out. You can wax lyrical a little, drop in some statistics, make some comparisons, or even references older stories.

At any given time, I am usually working on several different features at various stages of development. One might be almost ready to submit (always before deadline!), another might be at the polishing or self-editing stage, while I might be researching one or two others. Don’t forget that just as in the consumer press, some features are time sensitive and designed to coincide with certain events penciled into the international calendar.

The arrangement the magazine I work for has with the majority of companies it deals with can be best described as mutually beneficial. We need material, and they need publicity. The same companies we write about take out advertising in the magazines, and are also active across other departments. That said, something drummed into me early on was the importance of impartiality. For that reason, we never allow outside influences, like the possibility of upsetting an advertiser by painting them in a negative light, to affect us. News is news, after all.

There were other voices, too. I had to find within me the Yiddish accent of the painter Norman Raeben. The Transatlantic clip of the mother of method acting, Stella Adler. The inimitable drawl of Bob Dylan, speaking to my mother about his personal and artistic crises as he wrote Blood on the Tracks.

I was daunted by the range of voices that had drifted through my life into the novel. There were lines in a Scottish tilt, the Queen’s English, a Balkan doctor. The Shema, spoken in Hebrew with a Brooklyn Jewish accent––try that three times fast.

Every character in the book, like every person in life, sounded differently. While writing, I thought about who each person was. While reading the novel aloud, I had to consider what each person sounded like. It was a startling reminder that a person can never simply be taken into a novel for its own purposes; each character must have her own identity, scent, and voice, no matter how briefly the particular story at hand permits us to hear it. One of the qualities I admired most in my mother was her vision into the distinctness of each person she met. When I wasn’t sure how to read a line, I’d ask myself: What would my mother notice about this person? What would she tell me about him if they met?

Growing up, we didn’t have television. My mother somehow prevented me from using the internet until I was nearly a teenager. On summer days, when school was out and she was working, I often sat in the living room with Jim Dale and the Harry Potter cassettes. My day became a high drama of love, war, and friendship. Dale knew how to find the distinct voice and humanity of each character, no matter how incidental to the book. When I wasn’t thinking of how my mother would read a line, I was thinking about how he would.

Walking out of the studio one night, exhausted, feeling a sore throat coming on, I glimpsed a plaque with Dale’s name. He had recorded the seventh Harry Potter audiobook in the same studio, a few doors down from me. There’s only one word for that: Magic.

“Fine,” I said before I paused to consider it. It wasn’t like him to dislike something so vehemently in my writing. He was great at helping me think through stuff. So, I thought about the ghost.

Then I decided. Nope. Use of a ghost could be done well. It had been, on many an occasion. I would do it too.

“It’s a dynamic literary tool,” I said with greater conviction. “Marina (my ghost) doesn’t know who she is—doesn’t know the role Daisy played in her grisly death. She’s a full character by herself. She has her own story arc and the relationship between her and Daisy is wrought with angst. They hate each other. They ignore and antagonize each other. Marina is the ever-present sin of Daisy’s past and her moral barometer—but they still want to shove each other down the stairs most of the time. The story is about murder and shame and family and how the three live together in a single home. It’s about guilt and non-guilt and what humans are capable of. It’s dark and twisty and the ghost is essential.” Before I rested my case, I repeated with more emphasis, “It’s a dynamic literary tool!” as though it was all I needed to convince him.

He eyes. It was his version of an eye roll.

“Okay. Maybe just think of her as the undead?”

He considered that. Then he shrugged and just before returning to the pages, he said, “That could work.”

Women’s fiction is my truest creative passion, but special projects sometimes pull me in other directions. I’ve been developing a four-book women’s fiction series for years, and after multiple rewrites, I’m pleased with how they have progressed. The characters, their journeys, and their challenges feel authentic, and each has a strong story to share with women seeking mature fiction.

Then, unexpectedly, a long-simmering idea for a specialty cookbook demanded attention when opportunity and resources arose. I’ve always been veggie-averse and had crafted a collection of recipes to improve my own diet. As I spoke to others who shared the same aversion, I realized there was a real need for these recipes to be shared. That project became my new creative focus: a cookbook that caters specifically to adults like me—those who want to eat healthier but don’t care for the flavor of some vegetables.

As I tested recipes, styled dishes, and photographed food, my novel series quietly matured in the background. By the time the cookbook was complete and in production, I returned to fiction with fresh eyes and renewed energy. Switching genres hadn’t been a distraction—it was exactly the break I needed.

The result? The cookbook is scheduled for release in mid-September, and, even more exciting to me, is that the novella prequel and the first full-length novel in my women’s fiction series are set to launch by the end of the year. Pursuing the passion of one stimulated the creativity of the other.

For me, the cookbook project isn’t just about food, it’s about acceptance. Removing the stigma, guilt, or shame associated with being a picky eater, and instead offering creative, flavorful solutions for eating healthier without sacrificing flavor. That same spirit guides my author brand: embracing all parts of who I am and offering something authentic, helpful, or meaningful to my readers—no matter the genre.

While I plan to focus on women’s fiction moving forward, I’ll always leave room for the muse. Who knows where it may lead? But I’ve learned that passion is a brand in itself—and when you follow it honestly, readers will come along for the journey.

Because in the end, the stories we tell—whether in fiction, folklore, or food—are all part of the story we’re living.