Dear Friends:

With the terrible events of recent weeks, my life seems exceptionally small. Hopefully I can provide you with a brief respite. Later, I’ll voice my opinions.

I bet you thought I’d crawled into a hole and died. Well, a lot of things happened last year. If anyone followed my blog, you might remember how frustrated I’d become with my career. I decided to face music and sell my home in Marina del Rey for a far less expensive home on the outskirts of Dallas. My son and his family live here, and I’m enjoying my three adorable granddaughters.

REVENGE OF INNOCENTS should show up in the stores  by the end of the month, along with the paperback of SULLIVAN’S EVIDENCE.  Its wonderful when you realize your dream and shoot to the top, but its not much fun  when the party begins to fizzle. There’s always the comeback possibility. Only you, dear readers, can make that a reality. I don’t care if I’m on the bestseller list again. I just want people to read my books.

Although I was born in Dallas, I’d forgotten about the weather, particularly tornados. When I as ten, I was in one of the biggest tornados to ever hit this area. They called it the Oak Cliff Tornado, and I was lucky to have survived it.

I was alone with my baby brother in our house in Oak Cliff. The air felt funny and the she sky seemed to have turned. I heard what I thought was a train. I opened the front door and saw parts of houses and other large objects swirling around. I believe I closed all the doors, which isn’t the right thing to do. We hid in a closet until it passed. When I went outside, my street was destroyed, but our house had no damage at all. I saw the house across the street was gone. The older couple who lived there were lying on the foundation. The woman was dead, and the man was dying. I saw a man walking down the street carrying his severed arm.   

Getting old is no fun. First I had accidents and injuries, then I began my trips to the operating room. Later, it was the emergency room with my heart, complete with ambulances and sirens. Now they say I have diabetes. Really these new illnesses aren’t so bad. I was terrified I was going to have a heart attack. I don’t think of it much since I now have diabetes. The back is the worst. I was jogging and feeling great in Marina del Rey. Then I fell. I thought my recovery would be a few weeks. It turned out to be six months and counting. The doctors think a nerve may have grown around the metal they inserted when my back was fused.  

Not only did I have to move across the country to a climate nowhere near as nice as California, I had to move to Dallas alone. My husband, Dan, has another 10 months before he retires. His daughter is still in high school in LA. She will soon be heading off to college, so her father didn’t want to sacrifice his time with her.

Living apart from your spouse is difficult, but the move was a disaster. Writers hate to be uprooted. We need the right atmosphere to write, which is something I’d already created in California. Although I was supposed to be hard at work on my next book, I spent months pushing the furniture around, hanging heavy pictures, and doing everything I could to create another “writing nest.” My husband thinks I’m an crazy to crash my back so the furniture is in the right position. You can’t leave a person like me with a houseful of boxes. I don’t like to wait for someone to help me. When the doctor told me I might need another operation,  I had them inject me with steroids and never went back.  I’m feeling fairly good again and hard at work on my next book.  

Here comes the rant:

I was appalled that we had soldiers dying and being maimed in Iraq, and the only story that seemed to interest the media was the death of Anna Nicole Smith. This woman wasn’t a hero? She didn’t die in the service of her country, nor was she fighting for any cause outside of money and fame. She married a dying billionaire, fought his relatives for his money, and didn’t know who had fathered her child. The worst thing she did in my eyes was to use heavy narcotics during her pregnancy. What a terrible thing to do to a child. The question is why was anyone interested in this person.

 

Now we have the shattering massacre at Virginia Tech, where so many promising young people lost their lives. I acknowledge the event was newsworthy, and like Katrina,  network and news sources would be wrong if they didn’t cover it. What disturbs me is an intensely disturbed your man, without the courage to kill himself, is now received as a candidate running for president. The footage of him speaking his ridiculous manifesto, which I saw as a poor attempt at creative writing, should never have been aired. Did I watch it? Yes. I didn’t watch it on TV, though. I just saw a picture on cnn.com and clicked on the image. Think of how many young people did the same. 

We have become a strange society, a nation of voyeurs, who are intensely interested in the lives of people we wouldn’t speak to if we bumped into them on the street. Most of us who write about murder and violence have given a lot of thought to what we’re are doing. Reading fiction, regardless of the content, is purely escapism. I write about cases I handled when I was in the criminal justice system, and many of these cases have haunted me for years. They haunt me until I bring them to justice in my books. Killers don’t get away in my books. Too bad it isn’t the same in reality.

In my program for young people, VOICES OF TOMORROW, I teach young people who have the potential to commit acts of violence, to exorcise their demons through fiction. I would much rather have them write a story about killing someone than actually doing it.

This said, I believe we must find a way to remove first person shooter games from the shelves. You may be thinking I’m a hypocrite, claiming my books are escapism and the games are dangerous. If you have never seen or played one of these games, please find a kid to demonstrate one for you. You don’t have to own an X-box to play these games. You can find them in any arcade, although the violent content will not be as great

What you do in many of these games is precisely what the murderer at Virginia Tech did; you shoot as many people as you can as fast as you can. Then you win. We’ve seen this before. How many people have to die before we do something?

I appreciate my fans very much.

Enjoy the new book!

 Sincerely, 

Nancy