Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Ah-ha!  Of course!

You know, Mary, I marvelled at some of the revenge scenarios you wrote 
about (can I share a few of them without being a spoiler for the book?). 
I'm curious: did you make them all up yourself (in which case I will work 
very hard to stay on your good side!)?
  

    

Feel free to share some of your favorites, Libbi. I made them all up myself
and they were part of what made the novel so much fun to write.
  

    
Mary, do you think you'll put Nora and Sam out there again in another
mystery (ala Nick & Nora)?
  

    

I recently started thinking that I might. I hadn't intended to do a series
of comic Nora and Sam mysteries, but I keep having these ideas . . .
  

    

This month's Conde Nast Traveler has a complaint from a traveler to its
ombudsman about Iguacu Falls (details unimportant).  For once I knew what
they were talking about, thanks to SR.

I'm not sure I had a favorite revenge scenario--they were all so marvelously
realized.  But revenge is deep in the human psyche: we really want the
scales of justice to be balanced.  Only the most evolved of us let go and
stop fantasizing.
  

    

I love the idea of a revenge workshop (maybe it's the corporate trainer in 
me?).  I'll be back in a little while with some of my faves.
  

    

and I love the idea of a Corporate Training Revenge Workshop, Libbi.
Perhaps it could be called: "The Harmony of Revenge."
  

    

Actually, I wish I'd been able to run workshops like that when I worked in 
large companies.  That would've allowed people to vent their frustration 
towards incompetent managers and supervisors without too much damage to 
themselves or their careers.
  

    
Mary, I was lucky enough to have heard you at a book reading, and bought
"Sweet Revenge" there. Now that I've read it, I wondered about the revenge
fantasies you *didn't* use in the book.

It seems to me that many of us have some pretty harsh revenge fantasies that
go way beyond the kinds of things you wrote in the book. Did you dream up
revenges that you decided not to include? What were they? Did any of them
scare you? 
  

    

I'll wait for Mary to respond to that question before listing some of my 
fave revenges from the book...
  

    
(NOTE: Offsite readers who have questions or comments they'd like to see
added to this thread can email them to inkwell-hosts@well.com )
  

    

I intentionally avoided putting any truly evil revenges in the novel because
it's a comedy and I don't think revenge is funny unless the victims come out
more or less unscathed. Also I didn't want to be responsible for some poorly
balanced person seizing on my ideas and hurting (or even killing) someone.

What I did discover, as I did research, is that there are several really
mean (not at all funny) guides to revenge that you can buy at your local
bookstore. I found most of the things they suggested repellent, so, of
course I didn't include them.
  

    

I think actual ideas for actual revenges and fantasies about revenge fall
into two very different categories. Although I did censor actual ideas, I
didn't censor the fantasies in the novel as strictly. (As you recall,
several of them involved murdering the victim in ways that weren't pleasant-
but they were mostly silly, impractical ways like throwing the victim in a
Time Machine and sending them back to 1348 to get bubonic plague.). As the
leader of revenge fantasy seminars, Nora;s problem is that many people don't
appreciate the difference between fantasy and reality-between dreaming of a
revenge or acting it out. This is what gets her in real trouble.

As for being scared of my fantasies-even the most violent ones-I never am.
As a fiction writer I am very clear on the difference between fantasy and
reality and know for a fact that I am totally incapable of hurting another
person in any serious way. So fantasy is a free-play zone for me, and being
a Protestant (actually an ex-Methodist) I only believe that it's what you do
that counts as a sin; not what you think.
  

    

I've heard that line before, Mary!

So here are a couple of my favorite revenge fantasies:


"Flag down a couple of Mormon missionaries who are always riding around on 
bicycles and tell them he (your ex) wants them to come over to his house 
and tell him the good news  If he's already a Mormon, call up the Baptists 
and invite them to his place to help him understand the error of his 
ways."

There's advice about exponentially increasing the amount of spam in 
someone's email box and one scenario that involves being tied up with duct 
tape and forced to watch Water World and Ishtar.

My fave, though, is the 'fax of death', but I think I might withhold the 
details in case anyone decides to try it on me!
  

    

Good move, Libbi. Fax of Death is really wicked and really easy.
  

    
I once broke up with someone and theoretically considered the notion
of calling the IRS on him. I didn't, and I didn't even tell anyone
about it at the time, but the IRS did indeed show up and seize some of
his assets.

Mary, are you done writing the horse books?
  

    

I have a fourth book sketched out, so I may write #4 in the Earthsong
Trilogy (which then will have to be called at "tetrology" I suppose). Have I
mentioned anywhere that the whole trilogy just came back into print with
cool new covers? You can  go to iUniverse.com and search Mary Mackey if you
want to take a look at them, or you can go to my web page at

www.marymackey.com
  

    

Do you have any ideas for another comic novel in the works, Mary?

I'm curious if these comic novels are easier to write than the historical 
novels?  
  

    
Is the research at least easier?
  

    

Comic novels require very little research--a few months will suffice.
Historical novels take at least a year to reasearch if you are going to do
them properly and accurately.

I have long lists of ideas for novels, some comic, some not. Kate Clemens
and Mary Mackey are very busy girls when it comes to dreaming up plots.
  

    

Not at all surprising, from what I know of you, Mary!

Can you share some of your adventures from your recent trip to the Amazon 
(the river, not the web site)?  I know this isn't connected to the novel, 
but I'm sure there are some amazing tales to be told about the trip.
  

    

Going to strange (and preferably dangerous) places is all part of the
writer's life. When I was a girl, I noticed that famous novelists (who at
the time-Jane Austen and George Eliot excepted-were almost all men), did
adventurous things like sail around the world on whaling ships or go up the
Congo River in a broken-down steam boat. I decided when I grew up and became
a writer, I would not let being female get in the way. So ever since I
turned twenty-one, I have been throwing myself into unusual situations in
exotic places for the hell of it and because I think a writer who lives an
interesting life writes better. Someday, I may get around to working on a
memoir of my experiences which I should probably entitle: "My Life as
Hemingway", but that will be a while yet.
  

    

All this is to explain why, only a few weeks ago, I returned from a 16 day
canoe trip through the drowned jungles of the upper Amazon (or to be more
specific, the Rio Negro which is one of the two rivers that flow together in
Brazil at Manaus to form the Amazon). At this time of year, the Rio Negro
floods an area the size of California to a depth of from 30 to 60 feet,
leaving on the tops of the trees out of the water. So as you canoe through
them, you see all the wildlife (which has no other place to go, indeed
almost no solid ground to stand on). I went about 2000 miles in all and saw
four settlements. Two (Novo Airao and Barcelos) were towns you could walk
across in about 20 minutes. The other two were collections of fourteen and
ten huts respectively. There was no cell phone service, no internet, no
news. But there were hundreds of pink freshwater dolphins, monkeys, brightly
colored macaws, flocks of parrots, lung fish, alligators, piranhas, snakes,
tarantulas, purple and white orchids, herds of wild pigs, electric eels,
nasty biting spiders, delicious tropical fruits, scorpions, and some of the
most vicious, cannibalistic blackflies I have ever had the pleasure to
encounter.
  

    
> I went about 2000 miles in all...

By canoe? (imagining you with Popeye arms)
  

    

Any exciting adventures with those piranha?