What Not to Forget When Traveling Out of Country

One of my goals for the year was to attend one of the big crime fiction conferences. Since I had attended Left Coast Crime a few years back when it was in my home town of Phoenix, I decided to go with that.

As it turns out, this year's Left Coast Crime was being held in the beautiful city of Vancouver, British Columbia. Woohoo!

I'll admit, I'm not much of a world traveler. In fact, the last time I'd been outside of the United States was twenty years ago. But despite having turned into a bit of a homebody over the past couple of decades, I was excited about visiting our neighbor to the north.

And I was rather organized about it. I got my passport renewed in plenty of time. Hotel booked. Flights booked. Supershuttle booked. I'd called my bank and my cellphone carrier to let them know of my travel plans. I made a comprehensive list of things I needed to bring (including underwear and socks), and other things to do before I left. I was very organized.

All in all, I was looking forward to this little adventure.

Photo credit: simonlesleyphoto on Best Running  CC BY-ND

Sure, I was a wee bit nervous about getting through security. Kind of a crime fiction writer's dilemma. Secondary research can make one look suspicious, especially when you Google such topics as "the kill radius of one pound of C-4", "how to turn raw opium into heroin", and "how to defeat magnetic door locks."

Honestly, it's for research. Look! I have a concealed carry permit and a fingerprint card. I've already been checked out. To quote Eliza Doolittle, "I'm a good girl, I am."

But my concerns over being pulled into a room and questions by the TSA were unfounded, as it turns out. I wasn't on any "Do Not Fly" list. My passport wasn't flagged. In fact, I breezed right through security.

In fact, everything went great until I was in the air on my way to Calgary (where I would pick up a connecting flight to Vancouver.)

The flight attendant came down the aisle with the refreshment cart and asked if I'd like anything. I asked for a bag of granola bites and reached into my wallet to pull out my bank card. Which wasn't there.

Photo by johnhain

You know those scenes in movies where the walls start closing in? That's what it felt like. I was headed to Canada without my bank card. Let the panicking begin!

I dug through my bag and finally came up with a PayPal Mastercard. I paid for my snacks with it and the charge went through. Whew! So while in flight, I used the onboard WiFi to move some money from my regular bank account to the one that my PayPal account drew on since I had a zero PayPal balance.

I tried to breathe, but I was still a bit shaken up. Was that enough? Would I be okay?

When I reached Calgary, I got through customs okay and figured I better pull some cash out of the ATM before heading to my flight to Vancouver. I slipped in my card, tried to pull out a hundred dollars and...Transaction Declined. Resume panic attack!

I called PayPal. The customer service rep let me know I needed to authorize the card for use in Canada. I gave them all of the security responses and they authorized it. Great. I tried the ATM again. Transaction Declined. Crap!

The rep then explained I had a zero PayPal balance. I replied there was plenty of money in the bank account it drew on. He said he could transfer some money, but it would take three business days before it would be available. Ugh! Not helping!

Finally, I just said, "Screw it. In for a penny, in for a dollar. Or in this case, a loonie."

With the help of a friendly WestJet agent, I breezed through security and ran like an Olympic sprinter through the airport as they were announcing my name over the loudspeaker along with the words "Final Boarding Call."

Laurie Rockenbeck's Bound to Die

I just barely made it onboard my flight. Once in the air, I texted to my dear friend Laurie Rockenbeck, author of Bound to Die and Cleansed By Fire. She and I were going to be hosting a table at the Left Coast Crime banquet. Even as I sent her my panicky plea for help, a voice in my head was telling me I sounded like those FB scams where con artists pose as friends caught in a similar situation.

To let her know that my situation was legit, I included details about our books, previous interactions, and a very worried photo of myself on the plane. My biggest worry at the moment was how I was going to get from the Vancouver airport to the hotel. Did taxis in Vancouver take credit cards? And even if they did, would mine work?

Fortunately, Laurie responded, letting me know she was ready to help out in any way possible. It's so good to have friends.

When I arrived in Vancouver, I managed to grab a taxi. Yes, they did take credit cards. Whew!

While en route to the hotel, I called my wife and told her to send money from her PayPal account to mine. I also sent a panicked money request to a client that owed me a bit. She helped me out right away.

Bottom line, in the end, everything worked out. I was able to pay for what I needed to pay for. The conference was fabulous. I got to meet some friends who until then I'd only known via social media. I ate a lot of fabulous food. And everyone loved the panels I was on.

Me with Snopes's David Mikkelson

Me with Susanna Calkins, Julie L. Brown, and Lori Rader-Day

Me with Kellye Garrett

The moral of the story is twofold. First, when traveling, DON'T FORGET YOUR BANK CARD! Second, the Beatles were right. We do get by with a little help from our friends.

Thanks to my wife and all of my dear friends who made Left Coast Crime 2019 a wonderful experience. I can't wait to see you in San Diego next year.

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As one of the only transgender authors in crime fiction, Dharma Kelleher brings a unique voice to the genre, specializing in gritty crime fiction with a feminist kick. She rides a motorcycle, picks locks, and has a dark past she’d rather forget.

She is the author of the Jinx Ballou bounty hunter series and the Shea Stevens outlaw biker series. You can learn more about Dharma and her work at https://dharmakelleher.com.

Lori Rader-Day: The LITTLE PRETTY THINGS Interview

by Holly West

The only thing better than reading one of Lori Rader-Day's books is getting to sit down and have a conversation with her. I recently had the opportunity at Left Coast Crime in Phoenix and let me tell you, my cheeks were hurting from laughing so hard.

After I read her latest novel, LITTLE PRETTY THINGS, I knew I wanted to interview her about it and she kindly agreed, in spite of her busy schedule. And in spite of the fact that I keep calling the book PRETTY LITTLE THINGS.

HW: First, I want to talk about LITTLE PRETTY THINGS. I’ve been pretty vocal about how much I like it, so I was happy to see it was nominated for the 2016 Mary Higgins Clark Award like its predecessor, the Anthony Award-winning THE BLACK HOUR. Tell us, briefly, what it’s about.

LRD: LITTLE PRETTY THINGS is about Juliet Townsend, who is ten years out of high school and stuck in a bad job, cleaning a hotel in her small Indiana hometown. She used to have a lot of potential as a high school track star, beaten by only one person, her best friend, Maddy Bell. The two friends have been estranged since things went sour over their last race, so when Maddy sweeps into Juliet’s workplace and then is found dead the next morning, Juliet decides to take on the task of figuring out what’s happened to Maddy and also what went wrong in her own life. Friendships between women, regret, and I got to take my readers into the yearbook staff room, which is where I spent my high school career.

HW: One of the things I like most about LITTLE PRETTY THINGS is the setting, which might sound odd considering it’s a little (okay, a lot) depressing. There’s just something about cheap roadside motels, which are the only places my family ever stayed on our yearly vacations, that mixes a sense of dark hopelessness with a sense of freedom and even anonymity. Obviously, the perfect place to set a murder. What inspired the location and were there other menial jobs you considered for your protagonist, Juliet?

LRD: I love old buildings, and not just the architecturally significant ones but the ones that remind us of our own childhoods. I was inspired to create the Mid-Night Inn by two very different hotels near where I grew up. They’re both gone, now. One was a classic single strip of five or six rooms right alongside the highway called the Sunset Inn. By the time I was young, it was ruins, but the nearby building was being used as a café. It’s someone’s house now, believe it or not. My grandparents used to take us there for “coffee”—my sister and I got cheeseburgers. The other hotel wasn’t nearly as dilapidated as the Mid-Night, but I borrowed its location almost precisely. My dad recognized it, so I must have stolen very liberally. I actually had a few ideas for what Juliet could do next—different jobs, in case I wanted to continue Juliet’s story. I haven’t ruled that out, actually, so I’ll just say that Juliet was always a hotel cleaner for LITTLE PRETTY THINGS, but she has plans to get out of there and move up.

HW: Like Juliet, you grew up in Indiana, but you’ve lived a very different life beyond that. Is there anything else of her in you? In what ways do you relate to her and is that relating important to the writing of this book? I suppose the larger question is whether we as writers need to write about something we can relate to, sort of like “write what you know.”

LRD: I don’t think we have to write only what we know, but what we know can inform what we write. People who know me pretty well find plenty in my books to attribute directly back to me, which makes sense since I’m the one who wrote them. For LITTLE PRETTY THINGS, I did borrow from my hometown and other places I have lived but I also borrowed from the what-if file of my own life to create Juliet. I was wondering one day what the hell I’d be doing for a living if I hadn’t gone to college, and it was not too out of the realm of possibility that I might have Juliet’s kind of job. I worked for a couple of factories and a restaurant as summer jobs on my way to paying for college. I didn’t like that work at all, but lots of people don’t get the choice to like what they do. I come from a long line of blue-collar workers, and I think that perspective needs to be visible in our fiction. The problem is that most people who work those long hours don’t have the luxury of sitting down and learning how to write. Juliet is important to me in that way and, even though she gets a lot of stuff wrong, I like her.

HW: LITTLE PRETTY THINGS has sparked comparisons to Megan Abbott’s recent novels, and for me particularly, her novel, DARE ME (which if you haven’t read, you should, because it’s great). There is, I think, an inherent darkness in the world of teenage girls that I didn’t quite realize when I was actually a teenager but am now aware of and it discomfits me somewhat. I certainly wouldn’t want to revisit that time in my life. What made you want to explore this world and in effect, go back to it?

LRD: I’m a pantser, so to ask me why I did something like go back to high school in my books—well, you’re asking an impossible ouroboros question I’m not sure I can answer. I wanted to talk about friendships between women and I find that many of my close women friends I have today are from when I was younger—college, for me, and in my early jobs. I wanted to write about someone who was just at the moment where she might rescue herself or she might not succeed, someone who has, in fact, a lot of potential, even if she doesn’t realize it. Also, I think that when you’re writing about young people or about people still living in the towns they grew up in, it’s pretty easy to think that their high school lives aren’t as far away as it might be for someone who doesn’t drive past their school every day, who won’t be sending their own kids there someday. Plus, yeah, there’s a lot of material for drama when it comes to high school girls. I love Megan Abbott’s books!

HW: With two books published and a third soon to be released, do you feel like you’ve finally got this writing thing down?

LRD: Oh, hell no. I got to see Mary Higgins Clark speak once a couple of years ago and she said with every book she still thinks, “Maybe is the time I can’t do it.” So if Mary can admit it at book eighty-whatever, I feel OK about the truth.

HW: I’m a big advocate of becoming involved in local writing communities. You’re currently the president of the Midwest chapter of MWA, but your involvement in your own local community began long before that. Would you say it’s had a significant impact on your writing success or has it mostly been about the support such communities offer?

LRD: The best advice I could ever give a writer hoping to make headway in their craft and career is to find a tribe. I found two—I got an MFA in creative writing from Roosevelt University in Chicago and am still friends with many of the writers I met there. We read for each other, encourage each other. When I first found out I was a mystery writer (yes, I had to be told), I didn’t know many mystery writers, so I went to my first Bouchercon knowing only one person in the building. Overwhelmed is an understatement. But I met Clare O’Donohue there, who gave me golden advice: go join Mystery Writers of America. I got highly involved, made myself useful, got to know so many great people, read some great new books, and listened in as people who were further along this path than I was talked about the business. Now I’m the person talking about the business to people who want to learn, but I still get a lot from going to meetings and events, and I’m still meeting wonderful people.

***

Lori Rader-Day’s debut mystery, THE BLACK HOUR, won the 2014 Anthony Award for Best First Novel and was a finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her second novel, LITTLE PRETTY THINGS, also a finalist for this year's Mary Higgins Clark Award, received a starred review from Booklist and was named a 2015 “most arresting crime novel” by Kirkus Reviews. She lives in Chicago.

Leveling Up

by Holly West

When my four year old nephew is ready for dessert (which is pretty much always), he asks what he has to do to level up. Usually, it requires eating a few more bites of salad or whatever vegetable is still on his plate. Beat that boss and you can have a cookie.

As a writer, I think about leveling up a lot. Leveling up is a little different from writing the best book you can. Presumably, we all aim for that with every book we write. But how do I get to the next level as a writer? My current WIP, which I'm now revising, isn't leveling up so much as it's breaking free of the historical mysteries I've published so far. I'm proud of this book and I love it, but the next book I write will be a stab at something more ambitious. A "bigger" book, if that makes sense.

In the mean time, I'm always looking for books that represent what leveling up means to me. Simply put, they are books I wish I'd written myself. Books that make me suspect that no matter how long I do this, I'll never reach that story telling level. Bosses I might never beat but, damn it, I'll die trying.

Over the last couple of years, I've read several books that fall into this category. This doesn't necessarily mean that the book is a leveling up for the particular author. It only means that when I read it, I got a sense of the type of book I'd like to write. A book that inspires me to take more chances with my own writing. A book that reminds me why I want to be an author in the first place.

Here they are, in no particular order:

I'm always looking for more leveling up books, so tell me, what books have you read lately that represent leveling up to you?