P is for Pickard: Nancy Pickard

Today I continue the Mystery Author Alphabet Meme with a guest post from long time favorite writer and friend Nancy Pickard. P is for Pickard.

Nancy Pickard has won multiple Macavity Awards as well as Anthony and Agatha awards, and she is as a 4-time Edgar Award finalist. Having written three mystery series, she is now writing standalone novels set in her home state of Kansas. THE SCENT OF RAIN AND LIGHTNING was a Macavity finalist for best novel of 2010.

Nancy Pickard:

P is for Facebook. P is not for Twitter. P is for blogging. P is not for Skyping. That's P as in "me," of course. I'm on the technology train--or maybe I should call it the Technology Transport--but I find that I have to leave some of it on the track. I just can't do it all, and some parts of it call to me the way some books do; there's chemistry, you know? I have chemistry with Facebook, I don't have it with Twitter. I like blogging, though not too often, but I can't imagine wanting to let somebody see me on Skype, considering how awful the pictures are. And they are, right? Unless you're an adorable grandchild, Skype is not flattering to most humans, and while I don't need flattery, neither do I need to look worse than I do in real life. I have spent a lifetime hating the telephone, so iPhones may never lure me, and I don't like putting speakers in my ears, so the iPod leaves me cold, but you will probably have to bury me with my iPad, because once rigor mortis sets in, you'll never get it out of my hands. I mean it. Especially if I die in the middle of a game of "Words With Friends."

I love books. I love ebooks. I love any kind of books, but don't make me listen to recordings of my own books. Even when they're beautifully done, I can't bear to hear them. Please don't tell the talented actresses who do them!

I love tv. I love movies. So what if a lot of them are drek? A lot of books are, too, and no doubt there are people who think that includes mine. Mass media is just that--mass, and it's impossible for it to be Masterpiece Theatre all the time, or even most of the time, and we're lucky if it is good some of the time. I'm fine with that. In fact, I feel lucky there aren't more shows as superb as "The Good Wife," because if there were, I'd never get anything else done.

Technology and I are at peace.

We are happy together.

I don't have to like all of it. Not all of it likes me.

I don't even have to disapprove of its footprint; I'd be hypocritical to do so, since my own footprint is probably Sasquatch-sized, if I only knew all the ramifications of everything I use and do and watch and play and type and read and wear and drive. If I were given a real choice of keeping all my toys or letting the third-world live longer and happier lives, I'd hand over my laptop.

But the honest truth is, I love all this playful stuff.

Which means that I do not like being reminded of Steve Jobs' mortality. If I could appoint gods, he'd be on Mt. Olympus along with Leonardo DiVinci and whoever invented 7-ounce bottles of Corona Lite Beer. I might also include the inventors of Post-It Notes, email, the internet, and Kleenex. But I'm worried about S.J. I'm worried progress will stop when he's gone. We'll go backward. Both fresh inventions AND style will disappear. The fun will go out of life. We'll be forever stuck with that bad casting of Miss Marple on Masterpiece Theater, and never see a better portrayal. Okay, that's probably going too far. I confess to exaggerating, but really, who more perfectly captures the spirit of creativity and the joy of newness than Mr. Jobs? Granted, he hardly ever looks as if he's having any fun, but he has sure given me some. <<< That was not meant to sound as personal as it does.

I'm not old-fashioned. I'm not sentimental. I'm not nostalgic. For anything. I much prefer the new "Words With Friends" game to the old Scrabble, for instance. The past? It's gone. Today? It's here. Tomorrow? Well, that all depends on what Steve Jobs has in the stockroom for us.

To sum it up:

P is for progress. I'm for it.

Now if I can only make some of it on this manuscript for my next book. . .

Nancy Pickard Guest Halloween Guest Blogger

Hope you're enjoying the Crime Writer Halloween Guest blogs. Be sure and check them all out and the list of Halloween Mysteries. Today I welcome mystery writer Nancy Pickard. 

Nancy Pickard is a 4-time Macavity winner for her novels and short stories. She lives in Merriam, Kansas, where she is at work on her third “Kansas” novel following “The Virgin of Small Plains” and “The Scent of Rain and Lightning.”

My What Big Teeth You Have by Nancy W. Pickard

It’s not easy to scare me.

Oh, I still startle easily—walk up behind me and go Boo, and I’ll jump most satisfactorily, even when it’s not Halloween. Especially when it’s not Halloween. But I don’t get outright scared much anymore. Partly, I think it’s just a stubborn reaction to the politics of fear that’s going around like an epidemic of pretend chicken pox. To that, I dig in my heels and say, “No! Cut the crap.” It’s also partly because I am actually braver than I used to be; I did take those flying lessons, after all, even if I refused to do “stalls” all by myself. (Talk about terror!) I even can, as a grown-up, walk casually into a dark basement without needing to fumble in a panic for a light switch.

But I think the real reason lies with werewolves.

When I was way too young, my normally-cautious mom screwed up and let me go to the movies (what we used to call them then, because they literally were plural) with some older girls. Mom was practically as innocent as I was, and it didn’t occur to her to ask if they might be taking me to see THE SCARIEST PICTURE SHOW ON THE PLANET. (Scariest until “Psycho,” that is, but that was still many years away from forcing me to duck into the lane between the seats and cower there with my hands over my ears until the screeching was over.)

So little me, eight years old, skipped off to see the original Lon Chaney “Werewolf.”

Okay, so maybe my heart rate went up a little bit the moment I typed that capital “L,” and maybe it’s still beating a little faster than is strictly necessary for a woman who’s writing this on a porch at a friend’s house on a sunny day. But really, I’m over it. I’m fine with werewolves now.

“Scared” doesn’t begin to describe how that movie made me feel back then, however. My mom found out how scared when she had to run into my bedroom when I screamed for help that night because I was too frightened to sleep alone in the dark.

The werewolf virus infected me, but good.

From then on, I couldn’t go to scary movies, couldn’t bear to hear scary stories at slumber parties, couldn’t read scary books. And we’re talking about decades here, not just a few years of childhood. When I was in my twenties, I tried to read “The Exorcist,” and got so scared that I ran outside with it and buried it in a trash barrel! I didn’t like being that way; I wanted to “enjoy” chills and shudders the way other people did who hadn’t been bitten by the fear creature when they were too young to tell real from pretend.

But I’m over it now.

Really, I am. I even wrote a werewolf story for Charlaine and Toni’s anthology about same. That was my victory, that story. That was my ultimate triumph over the forces of hair and teeth and bloody transfiguration.

I even made the werewolves the good guys, of sorts.

One of the things that helped me emerge from Werewolf Phobia was a novel I wrote called The Whole Truth. Up until that book, I had skated around my villains, avoiding looking deeply at the worst they could do. But I had finally come to realize that was cowardly; I was a mystery writer, for heaven’s sake. The least I could do was meet my bad guys face-to-face, stare them down, dig deep into their lives and psyches, and find out what caused their mutations from human to monster.

That helped, because it turned them back from werewolf to human again, and it also probably made me a better writer. I may, in fact, owe my later books at least in part to my mother, Lon Chaney, older girls who didn’t have the good sense God gave a possum, and to centuries of werewolf lore.

One last observation before the full moon rises. . .

My maiden name was Wolfe.

Coincidence?

cue sound of howling in the distance

Of all the monsters in all the gin joints in the world, which ones scared you more than any others?