Vermilion Drift

I don’t know about most authors, but me, I’m almost never a good judge of the quality of what I’ve written. Except for one or two rare exceptions, by the time I’m finished with a manuscript—all seven or eight revisions—and my editor and I are in agreement that the work is ready for production, I’m usually sick to death of it. The story is lackluster, the writing pedestrian, the twists all telegraphed well beforehand. Everything about the project feels flat. I want nothing more to do with it, and am so ready to move on to the next story, which I’m always certain is bound to be better than the piece of dreck I’ve wasted the last year writing.

Vermilion Drift was no exception. I remember thinking at the end of the process that eventually every author has to turn out a piece that falls short, and I figured this was the piece for me. There were good elements in it, to be sure—the remarkable Iron Range setting, the deliciously dark secrets from the past of Cork O’Connor, the wonderful role Henry Meloux played. But overall, I thought I’d come up shy. All I could see were the weaknesses, the words that didn’t quite say what I’d hoped they would, the obvious manipulations, the floppy motivations, the potential for disaster.

Then I saw the finished book. Oh, is it lovely. One of my favorite covers. And then the reviews started rolling in. Starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. Kirkus, for god’s sake! They never like my stuff. Last week, I got word that the book will be reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, and is being considered as a People magazine book pick. We even got a call from Hollywood.

So now I’m stoked. What’s changed? Nothing, really, except I’ve been able to step back from the work and look at it through different eyes. With a little distance—and with the encouragement that comes from a good critical response—it’s easier to see the strengths of the story instead of focusing all that I know falls short.

No work is perfect, but at the outset we always believe somehow we can make it so. In the end—to maintain sanity—an author needs to learn to come to terms with the great potential and the ultimate reality. Kind of like loving someone even though there are things about them that drive you nuts.

For much of his life he taught high school English. He was a good teacher, in part because he didn’t just deal with academics. He taught about life in so many of its aspects: ethics and relationship and individual responsibility. He made a difference in the lives of a lot of kids. I say this not just because I’m his son, but because over the years he’s heard from a number of former students who have said basically the same thing. I went to my high school class’s 40th reunion last year, and I heard from a lot of my former classmates about the remarkable influence my father had on them.

Recently, I received an email from a woman who’d been taught by my father and with whom I’ve been out of touch for over forty years. She found me on Facebook, and a major part of her message to me concerned my father. I’ve asked her permission to include her words in this blog posting. This is what she wrote:

“I especially want to tell you what I wished I could have told your Dad over the many decades of my life, had I known where to find him. To this day, ‘Mr. Krueger’ remains one of those special people in my life. He was my favorite teacher and my definition of the ideal teacher. I thought he was a the most wonderful, gentle, respectful and ethical human being when I was his student, and I know I was lucky to have had the experience of knowing him at that time of my life. At so many times since, something he said will echo in my mind. Or the memory of him leading a class discussion while leaning against the windowsill at the side of the room, or walking through the hall or into the classroom with that purposeful but gentlemanly stride of his, will pop into my head for some reason. Given that he was a father of 4 and a husband, with the same demands, chores, and financial constraints most of our families faced in the 60’s, his constancy of respectful and intelligent discourse with classrooms full of teen-aged emotions, preoccupations and intellect seems even more remarkable. At the last reunion, Jerry Jacques said he had heard that Mr. Krueger had passed away the year before. It was wonderful to see your photo of your Dad on Facebook, and my heart warmed to see that familiar smile of his. I hope that on the other side, when people think of us with strong feelings, our spirits can witness and understand what our lives here have meant to others. I imagine him there, smiling with astonishment, often.”

Brett Favre just announced that he’s going to return for another year as quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings. It’s been reported that he could earn as much as 28 million dollars this year. I don’t mean to take anything away from Brett. He’s a good quarterback and fun to watch. But $28,000,000?

When my father taught school, he worked summers at other jobs, as did most teachers, in order to make ends meet. People don’t become teachers because they get paid well. And in the end, maybe that’s the point of this post. We give our athletes—and our actors and our celebrities—outrageous sums to entertain us. But the people who make a real difference in our lives—teachers and ministers and nurses and cops and librarians—often scrape by on what we pay them. There’s something abysmally out of whack in our priorities.

Ask my father if he would have done things differently—been a pro quarterback, maybe, or Hollywood star—and he’d tell you that what he received for all that he gave was worth more than money. And what he gave was invaluable.

I’m working on a novel right now.  When completed, it will be the eleventh in the Cork O’Connor series.  The title is Northwest Angle.  The book is set in one of the most remote areas of Minnesota, and the story, as I’ve conceived it, is a convoluted situation of misunderstanding, mostly as the result of prejudice.  People die and the where the finger of guilt points—with support of the evidence—is at the wrong man.  Even Cork buys into the local prejudices.  Add to the pot(boiler) some ruthless smugglers and a foundling child whom death follows like a shadow and you have the general ingredients of the story.

So I have a notion of what’s going to occur.  I know, more or less, the A, B, C of things.  What I’m struggling with is the information and occurrences that will naturally connect the plot points.  And therein lies the struggle.

In the past, I’ve usually outlined a book, or at least thought the plot through significantly, so I’m almost never worried about the dreaded question that keeps many mystery writers up at night: What happens next? But I’ll admit that in this manuscript I’m flying by the seat of my pants.  I struggle with chronology, structure, characters (way too many in this one, I fear), motivation.  In essence, everything.

I admit there are moments when I’m not sure I can pull it all together.  I think to myself, Every author is allowed a book now and then that falls short.  So maybe this is going to be the one.

I hate myself for even thinking this.  I don’t ever want to let myself or my readers down with an effort I didn’t put my full heart into.  So I struggle and lie awake at night and live with the fear of failure and every morning I get up and go to the coffee shop and give it my best effort.

I remember reading a note John Steinbeck sent to his editor along with the manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath. In the note, he apologized for the book he was delivering, feeling he’d somehow fallen short.  Even the greats have struggled.

When you experience this lake, the 14^th largest freshwater lake in the world, with its 14,000 islands, you can see clearly how easy it would be to lose your way.  These days, most boats are outfitted with GPS that tell you not only where you are but also where the reefs and hidden rocks lie.  But in the old days, I’ve been told, it wasn’t at all uncommon to have to organize a search for a boat full of fishermen who’d gone off without a guide.

Our second day on the Angle, one of the guides for the Angle Inn Lodge, a terrific guy named Tony Ebnet, offered to squire us around Lake of the Woods.  We leaped at the offer.  Tony’s been coming to Oak Island for a lot of years, and has been guiding for the folks at Angle Inn Lodge for the last five.  He knows the lake pretty well and has a great repertoire of stories.

We headed off about nine in the morning, on a day that we were told was unusually calm.  The lake water surprised me.  It wasn’t crystal clear, as are so many of the lakes I know in the Arrowhead region.  It was the color of strong tea.  Tony told us this is from the algae that grows naturally in the lake, a phenomenon noted by the voyageurs over 200 years ago.  In Tony’s comfortable launch, we zipped first to Cyclone Island where there’s an unmanned custom station, and we checked in with Canadian officials.  Then we began a full day on the lake.

We visited Massacre Island, and Tony told us the grisly story behind its well-earned moniker.  We cut up narrow passages between islands, veered into picturesque inlets, motored along steep cliff faces, and hit the broad and unusually smooth water of some huge bays.

Around noon we stopped for lunch at Wiley Point Lodge, a remarkably modern enclave deep in the remote wilderness.  Finally we headed south, back toward the Angle.  Along the way, we visited Windigo Island, which is home to the Reserve 37 First Nations band of Ojibwe.  Our final stop was at Ft. Saint Charles, a reconstruction of the important fur trading center built in the early 1700’s.

I snapped photos like crazy and scribbled madly in the notebook I’d brought.  That day on the lake didn’t make me an expert, but it gave me an invaluable sense of the place where my next novel would be set.  By the time we returned to Angle Inn Lodge, Diane and I were sunburned, exhausted, and at the same time exhilarated.

I’ve talked with authors who use the Internet to research the locations for their novels.  I’m always more than a little skeptical about the quality of the job they do when creating a story’s sense of place.  Me, I have to go there.  And I’m always glad I did.

Lake of the Woods: One of the largest bodies of water on the North American continent.  Straddling the U.S. Canadian border, it is eighty miles long, sixty miles wide, and contains more than 14,000 islands, mostly uninhabited.  This is the best walleye-fishing lake in the world.  It has also become a notorious avenue for international smuggling.

Like many Minnesotans, I’d heard of Lake of the Woods and the Northwest Angle, but I’d never paid much attention.  These were places so far north that not many people—except really rabid walleye fishermen—ever went there.  But nearly a year ago, while casting about for a good seed idea for the next Cork O’Connor novel, I happened to visit the Kitchigami library system (think Brainerd) in northwestern Minnesota.  After one of the events, I went out with the librarian and some other folks for a beer or two.  For reasons I can’t now recall, talk turned to the Northwest Angle.  When I heard, really heard, about this place, all my sensibilities as a mystery writer tingled.  Here was a remote, little known area surrounded by a vast body of water that contained a gazillion, mostly wild islands, with an international border running through it.  In addition, much of the land was held by the Ojibwe.  I thought to myself, All kinds of criminal activities could go on out there, hidden among those islands. Honest to god, by the time I’d returned to St. Paul, I had a rough outline of the story already in my head.

But I’d never been to the Angle, as it’s called by locals.  And because I write profoundly out of a sense of place, I knew I had to visit the area and spend time on the Lake of the Woods.  So in mid-July, that’s exactly what I did.

Internationally speaking, the Angle is problematic.  After driving almost eight hours north from the Twin Cities, you hit the border just outside Warroad, Minnesota.  You have to pass through customs where, because of the events of 9/11, passports have become necessary.  Then you drive another hour on mostly back road, some of it pretty rugged, and, in the middle of a great woodland, cross the border back into the United States.  There’s no customs office at that point, only a sign noting the shift of nationality.  A few miles farther, you come to a place called Jim’s Corner, where there’s a little, unmanned booth with a video phone and instructions (a little vague) on how to call into U.S. customs to report your entry.  Sometimes the videophone works and sometimes it doesn’t.  For me, it didn’t.  So I entered the U.S. technically illegally.  I would later learn the horrible potential in this action.

We drove, my wife and I, for several more miles along the dusty washboard road through thick forest until we finally came to the Angle.  I was surprised.  In a place so far removed, I’d expected primitive conditions.  The Angle is remarkably modern.  Electricity, land phones, even Internet.  The only thing you can’t count on is cell phone reception.  It’s pretty hit or miss (mostly miss) up there.

At Young’s Landing, we were picked up by Deb of the Island Passenger Service and ferried out to Oak Island, where we’d made arrangements to stay at the Angle Inn Lodge.  Our wonderful hosts, Debra Kellerman and Tony Wandersee, greeted us and our Lake of the Woods adventure began.

In my next posting, I’ll tell you all about our exploration of that incredible lake and the graciousness of the folks who call it home.

Okay, it’s confession time.  I almost always begin my research these day by turning to the Internet.  It’s a wealth of information (and misinformation).  The Internet gives me an idea of the scope of what I’m trying to understand, and more often than not points me in the right direction.  From there, I usually move to reading: periodicals, books, newspapers, all the more reliable sources.  And finally, I make contact with someone in the field who has firsthand experience with whatever it is I need to know.  Over the years, I’ve talked with beat cops, homicide investigators, coroners, M.E.s, rural sheriffs, agents of the FBI, the Secret Service, and Minnesota’s own Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.  I’ve talked with guides in the great Northwoods of Minnesota, divers in Lake Superior, morticians (got a really great tour of a prep room!), judges, prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys, emergency room doctors and nurses.  And, of course, I talk a lot with the Ojibwe.

Despite the fact that I’ve been at this for a very long time now, I’m still reluctant to approach a source I don’t know.  I’m always a little afraid I’ll be intruding somehow.  But the truth has always been that people love to talk about what they do.  Most people are incredible generous with their time and their knowledge.  And I always learn something of amazing value.

Here’s an example:  In my stand alone thriller, The Devil’s Bed, I needed to have a mental patient incarcerated in a high-security facility make an escape.  I made arrangements to tour the Regional Treatment Center in St. Peter, Minnesota, where the most dangerous of the state’s criminally ill are confined for observation and treatment.  It turned out that the facilities manager, a guy named Tom Kramer, was a fan of my work, and he gave me a stellar tour.  What I found was an imposing complex surrounded by high fences with razor wire and with multiple perimeter alarms.  At the end, I turned to Tom and said, “I don’t know how anyone could escape from this place.”  Tom smiled and said, “Oh, but I do.”  He proceeded to describe for me the most recent escape from the facility, and it became the foundation for the method of escape I used in The Devil’s Bed.

This kind of thing happens all the time.  Meeting these generous folks, hearing their fascinating stories, filling in the vast areas of ignorance in my own knowledge, these are all perks of my job.  God, I love what I do!

I just recently returned from a research visit to a fascinating and little known area of Minnesota called the Northwest Angle, where the book I’m currently writing for the series is set.  In my next blog, I’ll tell you about that incredible visit.

I’ve been a part of this writer’s group for eighteen years.  We have a name.  We call ourselves Crème de la Crime.  We’re all mystery writers.  Some of us are published, some are very close to publishing, and some probably never will publish.  Whenever I’m asked what I consider the most important element in my development as a writer, I always begin with Crème de la Crime.

In 1992, when I sat down to begin work on the manuscript that eventually became my first published novel, Iron Lake, and decided it was going to be a mystery (because I was desperate to be published and I stupidly thought any moron ought to be able to write and publish a mystery) I found myself stymied.  I wasn’t a great reader of mysteries at that time.  My father was a high school English teacher, and he raised his children on literature with a capital L.  Growing up, I didn’t even read The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew.  So I didn’t know the first thing about how write in the genre.  What did I do?  I took a course at The Loft (a well-known center in the Twin Cities, devoted to the written word) called, I believe, How To Write A Mystery.  The class was taught by Mary Logue, a marvelous writer in many genres, including mystery.  It was a great experience, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so.  When the class ended, ten of us who’d been students decided to form a continuing support group, and Crème de la Crime was born.

For eighteen years, we’ve met every Thursday evening to critique one another’s work.  I recall vaguely that in the beginning some adjustment was necessary for all of us.  Hearing your work criticized is never easy, and learning how to critique effectively is a learned skill.  Some of the original group didn’t survive the adjustment period.  Those of us who did have greatly strengthened our editorial ability over the nearly two decades of our association.

Every writer needs a good editorial eye.  And writers need to hear constantly that whether they’re published or not, the path they’re on is worthwhile.  (Our culture views success in so narrow a focus that publication and huge sales seem to be the most gauge of writer’s ability; what a travesty!)  A writer’s group can provide both these very necessary forms of support.

That said, not all writer’s groups are beneficial.  Like any human association, a writer’s group can be dysfunctional, and if you find yourself in one of these, get out as quickly as you can.  In my own mind, there are a few elements that can ensure the success of a group.  First, all members should be focused on the same genre.  Poets or essayists, for example, or even many literary fiction writers don’t have the frame of reference to critique a mystery effectively.  A group should meet regularly, and members should be willing to make that time commitment to the group.  And finally, writers should learn how to critique; there are a number of resources out there with good suggestions in this regard, but the bottom line is be respectful, be encouraging, and be honest.

I wish good luck to those of you searching for a group, and I hope sincerely that your experience is as profoundly beneficial as mine has been.

Examples from my own work:

In my second novel, Boundary Waters, the opening scene has a man deep in the wilderness of northern Minnesota holding a burning stick from a beech tree.  Why a beech tree?  I wanted the stick to be a particularly hard wood, so I chose beech.  I’ve seen beech trees in Minnesota, so I figured I was on solid ground.  The book comes out, and immediately I get an email that praises the story but very clearly points out that there are NO BEECH TREES IN NORTHERN MINNESOTA!  Not true, I think, and consult my Minnesota tree handbook.  Where it states emphatically that there ARE beech trees in Minnesota, but none north of a line running approximately through the middle of the state.  Crap.

In Red Knife, I committed two egregious errors, caught by many readers.  The first involves a statement by a character in which he quotes a famous Southern commander in the Civil War.  The statement is one we’ve all heard.  To win a battle the bottom line is that you have to get there “the firstest with the mostest.”  I’ve known that line since the 6^th grade and I know it’s attributed to Nathan Bedford Forrest.  In Red Knife, however, off the top of my head, I gave credit to Jeb Stuart.  Man, do I get a lot of email about that one.  But that’s not all.  There’s a significant continuity error in a scene that’s only recently been pointed out to me.  In a climactic confrontation between the Ojibwe and some very bad drug runners, an important gun magically morphs from a Beretta to a Glock in the course of a couple of pages.

One of the funniest errors deals with chronology.  In one of the books, Stevie, Cork’s son, begins the story in the third grade.  Near the end, he’s in the second grade.  Stevie’s a bright kid, so the fault isn’t his.  Just a stumble from the guy who created him.

All authors make mistakes.  We’re working on such a large and complex scale in our thinking that sometimes we err in the small stuff.  Or we hope that it’s only in the small stuff.  But even these errors are embarrassing and unfortunate, because any error, no matter how small, can pull a reader out of the story.  And no writer wants that.

If you find an mistake in my work, I don’t mind that you write me and point it out.  Just don’t gloat, okay?

The first book I ever tried to write was horribly—embarrassingly—autobiographic.  Isn’t every author’s first attempt?  Since that time, I’ve written only what I imagine might happen in lives that I’ve imagined as well.  Tapping into my own real life, my own real thoughts seems eerily as if I’m opening a very private window and I don’t have any idea who might be peeking in.  Do you understand?

That said, the advice from all quarters is that one should blog.  So I’ll give it another shot.  I won’t promise a lot.  This is sort of a “we’ll see how it goes” proposition.

Okay, so what I’ll talk about this week is, ta-da!, audio books.

I love audio books.  I travel a lot and audio books are my preferred form of entertainment on the road.  Miles disappear when I’m deep in a good story being told to me well.  I choose books from all over the spectrum of literature.  I remember a terrific road trip to Wyoming to research Heaven’s Keep. Dickens’ Great Expectations kept me enthralled across a couple thousand miles of desolate high plains.  I’ve listened to John Grisham and Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy and Anne Tyler and Michael Connelly and Deborah Crombie and on and on.

Part of what makes an audiobook great is the reader, of course.  I love the way Will Patton reads James Lee Burke’s work.  And back in the day when I still enjoyed Janet Evanovich—this was a long time ago—Lori Petty’s voice was for me the true voice of Stephanie Plum.  But a reader can also ruin a good book.  I’ve punched the “Eject” button on a number of occasions when some bozo was absolutely butchering a story.

I’m often asked if my own works are available as audiobooks.  The answer is a resounding yes!  Every book has been produced on audio, but they may not all be easy to track down at this point.  The first three in the series—Iron Lake, Boundary Waters, and Purgatory Ridge—were put out by a company called Books In Motion.  Their customer base is over-the-road truckers (ergo, Books In Motion).  So those audiotapes are available primarily in remote truck stops in places like Grand Island, Nebraska or Liberty, Kansas.  The middle books in the series—Blood Hollow, Mercy Falls, and Copper River were done as audio CDs by Recorded Books, and a fine job those folks did.  (Recorded Books has picked up the rights to the first three in the series and is in the process of creating audio CDs, which should all be available very soon.)  From Thunder Bay on, Brilliance Audio has put out the audio CDs of my work.  And, oh, do I love the job they do.

Buck Shirner is the guy who reads my work for Brilliance.  He’s absolutely terrific.  His first reading was Thunder Bay, and that audiobook was nominated for an Audie, the audiobook industry’s version of the Academy Awards.  His most recent reading—Heaven’s Keep—earned him an Earphones Award, given by AudioFile Magazine for ”truly exceptional presentations that excel in narrative voice and style, vocal characterizations, appropriateness for the audio format, and enhancement of the text.”  If you haven’t tried me on audio, my suggestion is that you begin with a reading by Buck Shirner.

If you’re interested in the whole oeuvre on audio, here are the links for all three companies that have produced my work.  You can find everything of mine that you might be looking for:

Books In Motion:  www.booksinmotion.com

Recorded Books: www.recordedbooks.com

Brilliance Audio:  www.brillianceaudio.com

That’s all for now.  Talk to you later.

I managed during the early part of my tour to spend a week in Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast.  And something amazing happened there.

For those of you who aren’t aware of it, I lived most of my high school years in Oregon.  I still have some family in Portland, so I come back periodically.  But not just for family.  Oregon is a beautiful place, and no more so than along its remarkable coastline.

Lincoln City is a resort town.  It has all the downsides of that kind of community.  Too many shops selling crap, too many cars crowding the single main street (the famous 101, the Pacific Coast Highway), too many signs screaming at you:  “Come in here!”  “Buy here!”  “See the amazing whatever in here!”  It proved, however to be a wonderful place to stay.

We rented a house perched high on a cliff overlooking the ocean.  The view, as you might imagine, was stunning.  We watched whales cavort not three hundred yards from shore.  We saw seals in the surf.  The sunsets were glorious.  At night, you could walk on the silver road the full moon paved across the dark sea.

That was all fabulous, of course.  But this was also a working vacation for me.  I have a deadline to meet—the next Cork O’Connor book—and things weren’t going well.  I’d been stymied over the ending.  The book is called Vermilion Drift.  It’s the story of a serial killer’s spree in the early 60s that comes back to haunt Cork in the current day.  There are dark, grisly secrets that Cork uncovers about his family’s past.  It’s a pretty good tale, but I simply couldn’t bring it to a close in a way that satisfied me.  I’d been stuck for weeks on that ending.

The house had a hot tub.  Every morning after I’d put in my time writing, I shucked my clothes, threw on my suit, and hit the hot tub.  Like the house, it sat at the lip of a sheer cliff.  And like the view from the house, what I could see from the hot tub was nothing short of remarkable.  I sat with all that relaxing, bubbling hot water swirling around my body, and with that incredible sky and ocean and coastline to rest my eyes on.  And my mind, oh my mind just opened up.  The day before I left Lincoln City, sitting in the hot tub in the morning, the closing for Vermilion Drift descended on me, drifting down like a feather from an angel’s wing.  And it was good.  It was very good.

I’ve been doing a lot of book events lately to promote my most recent novel, Heaven’s Keep. I’ve been flying or driving long distances, eating badly, getting too little sleep, exhausting myself.  And all the time, the next book deadline has been sitting on my shoulders.  What I found on this cliff house in Oregon is that there is great value in a vacation.  Beyond the obvious—the loosening of knots in both mind and body—currents of creative energy, blocked by the pressures of busy days, begin to flow again and breakthroughs become possible.  Weights are lifted.  Smiles return.  And the future becomes a beautiful thing to contemplate.  My wife assures me I could achieve the same sense of peace and purpose with yoga.  I don’t do yoga.  But vacations I’m pretty good at.