Living On The Cusp

My life changed in an instant. One moment I was outgoing and sociable, impulsive and carefree, bordering on irresponsible. I was an optimist operating on blind faith, the type who jumped in first and worried about consequences later. A moment later, I became someone who preferred solitude to the point of being reclusive. I was careful and methodical and my view on life was realistic, if not pessimistic. What changed in that one moment? My sign. As I switched from one website to another, I transformed based on the differing dates the websites indicated matched astrological signs. Such is life when you're born on the cusp.

Once more (as I did last week when writing about True Believers), I looked to miriam.webster.com for clarity. Not only in astrology but in life, a cusp is "a point of transition (as from one historical period to the next)" or the "edge" or "verge." My birthday falls on the cusp of the astrological signs of Sagittarius--the characteristics of which I described first above--and Capricorn--the second. While I'm not a believer in astrology, I  find the cusp fits much of my life, starting in childhood.

I have two brothers who are over 7 years older than me and no other siblings. My parents were in their 40s when they had me. This combination of circumstances has left me feeling always a bit out of step with my peers. When I was in high school I listened to the music my brothers and their friends liked: Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Beatles, Neil Young, Crosby Stills and Nash, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie. Many of the books my brothers read when they were in high school, I read at the same time, so I was introduced to ideas and philosophies that were not on the minds of most fifth and sixth graders. Being raised by parents who lived through the Depression, my attitudes toward money differed significantly from that of most people my age. (That actually came in very handy in the years leading up to the recession that began in 2008.)

If you are interested in astrology, I found this book on Amazon all about being on the cusp.

Also, having siblings so much older than me made me in some ways more like an only child. I conversed more often with adults than with children. I had my own room, and I still tend to like a lot of space. Yet, I had the advantage of having siblings who generally liked me when I wasn't annoying them. They came up with a connect the dots approach to teaching me how to draw shapes, made games out of learning to tie my shoes and do arithmetic, and tried to teach me how to play softball. They were never too successful with that last one. They stopped when I batted the ball into my own nose. There's a reason I make my living as a writer and a lawyer, not an athlete.

The trend of being out of step age-wise continued in law school. I attended school at night and worked full time. Most other night students were (a) recently out of college and attending at night because they needed to work full time to afford school or (b) in their forties and up and changing careers from other professions. I was 30 when I started law school, and 34 when I became a lawyer. The attorneys I started at a large firm with were 8 years younger than me, and most people assumed I was of a similar age and had a similar lack of professional work experience.

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There were definite pluses to that assumption. The clients paid the same rate for me as they did for other brand new lawyers, but I'd worked full time for years in several different businesses and one law firm. I knew how to write business letters, conduct interviews, write motions, research efficiently and undertake other tasks that involved a steep learning curve for some of my colleagues. That meant my work was in demand, and I more quickly got more responsibility. In other ways, though, I felt perpetually behind. The 35 year olds at the firm were partners, not brand new associates, and I measured myself against them rather than against lawyers who'd just graduated law school. I was also less willing to devote endless hours to law for as many years as some of the twenty-somethings were. I think that's healthy, but large firms tend to prefer those attorneys who spend several years of doing nothing but working before they start asking themselves whether they might want to have time for other aspects of life.

As a writer, I live on the cusp of groundbreaking changes in the publishing world. When I was writing horror and young adult novels in the 8 years after college, the only real option for a writer to sell her novels was to query agent after agent and publisher after publisher, hoping to become the one new writer out of hundreds of thousands that year whose work was pulled out of the stacks of manuscripts on an intern's desk. When I began writing supernatural thrillers after practicing law for 7 or 8 years, I discovered a wonderful thing. If I believed in my writing and was willing to put my own effort behind it, I could publish my own work, becoming an entrepreneur as an author just as I had as a lawyer. The great part about having lived in both worlds is I developed good habits when querying agents and editors. Because I knew grammar errors and uneven writing would get my query or sample chapters tossed immediately, I learned to be vigilant about producing carefully edited prose. That's served me well as the quality control supervisor of my own publishing enterprise. It also means I'm used to spending significant time and effort putting my work out into the world. And the rewards are so much more immediate and tangible with indie publishing because I can see sales within days and royalties within months rather than waiting six months to a year to hear back from a single agent.

As a whole, despite the occasional uncertainty I feel at not firmly belonging within any one world (or one astrological sign), being on the cusp has been a wonderful way to live. I like to think I can take the best of each place I've been and can make more conscious choices than I might if I fit completely within a particular category.

What about you? Are there ways you live on the cusp or that you fit right into a particular category? What are the pluses and minuses you've found for either?

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Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews of M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) books and movies, click here to join her email list and receive free a short horror story, Ninevah, published exclusively to M.O.S.T. subscribers.

Missed Communications And The Rise Of The Emojis

I had another topic in mind for this week’s blog post, but I started reading comments from beta readers (first readers who critique a writer’s manuscript) for The Conflagration, Book 3 in my supernatural thriller series, and it got me thinking about how people communicate, and fail to communicate, in today’s world. The readers of this draft of The Conflagration raised questions about plot points and characters that I had thought I’d written clearly. One bit of crucial information about who is sending cryptic Bible verses about Satan appeared in my outline for the book, but not in the manuscript. And I’d cut scenes between two characters (professor and former nun Sophia Gaddini and billionaire Erik Holmes, for those following the Awakening series) to keep the plot moving quickly, but that left one of the characters underdeveloped, as what was in my mind never made it onto the page.

Already I have ideas about how to revise to address these points. But the same types of miscommunications—and missed communications—happen all the time in day-to-day life and, unfortunately, we don’t have beta readers to review what we say or write before we share with others.

The Death of Letters

Ironically, this age of multiple communication methods and platforms seems to lead to more communication problems. Part of it is the death of written letters. Three or four decades ago, people regularly wrote letters for business and personal reasons. Handwriting takes time. Word processing is quicker, but it allows multiple revisions. Either way, letter writers tended to think about what they wrote and read their words again before sending the correspondence, which in itself was a process. You couldn’t zap off a letter in a rush of anger two seconds after you finished it. At the very least, you needed to address an envelope and walk it to a postage machine in your office or find a stamp and a mailbox. The length of letters also allowed the writer to include details and asides that conveyed tone and emotion.

The Depth of Real Phone Calls

Phone calls, too, provided cues that are missing in most communication today. I’m referring to “real” phone calls—ones on landlines with good sound quality. Tone of voice, how quickly or slowly someone spoke, hesitation, breathing—all of these gave cues to the listener about what the speaker meant and felt. And phone calls were two way. If my friend on the other end of the phone line understood something different from what I meant, I usually could tell that based on her response and further explain myself.

All this is not to say that today’s communication methods are worse than those in the past. Technology has allowed us to expand communication in so many ways. For example, video conferencing, though it hasn’t caught on as much as I'd expected. When I was a kid, video telephone calls were a staple in futuristic television shows or movies. Now such calls are easy and free for anyone who has Internet access and a Skype account or FaceTime. Yet, I have only one friend who FaceTimes periodically with me, but usually we talk on the phone, and more often than that, we text. Also, I’ve yet to use video conferencing on a day-to-day basis for business. Texting or emailing is quicker and allows the sender to communicate when she has time, and the recipient to answer whenever it’s convenient. It’s often hard enough to find a time when two people are free to talk via phone, let alone when both are able to access a video device and want to be seen. (My mom’s generation used to have a phrase called “putting on your face,” meaning to put on the amount of make up considered appropriate to see other people. In a more general sense, I think that’s also a factor in why video telephoning hasn’t become common.)

The Rise of Emojis and Exclamation Marks!!

Another innovation is the emoji, descendant of the emoticon. The emoticon came about when letters gave way to emails, which are still a main method of business communication. A letter was long if it went past a few pages; an email is long if it exceeds a paragraph. That makes it harder to read tone, and I probably spend nearly as much time composing and revising an email as I did a letter, despite its drastically shorter length. Because of that, in the 90s, people began combining and typing symbols to show emotions, such as :) or :(  According to what I found on the internet here, as texting became more prevalent, emojis, shown above, developed to replace the multiple character emoticons. An emoji is a small picture that counts as a single character, thus making it easier to stay within text message limits. (If you’re into grammar, here’s an Atlantic post on whether the plural of emoji is emojis or emoji.) Emojis and emoticons, as well as a lot of added punctuation, provide tone and context for texts. Without them, promises to get together soon or congratulations on graduations or promotions or new babies can sound flat or, worse, sarcastic. Emojis also can go beyond tone and convey activities or messages in themselves.

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Emojis Take Over Social Media

I also see emojis in social media, which makes sense. Social media typically involves people interacting through public personae, often carefully crafted. In a certain way, this makes the communication less interactive. One person posts carefully chosen photos, videos, quotes, and anecdotes. Others comment, often at a different time, and often in posts as short as those in texts. It’s easy for people who just happen to comment on the same photo to debate, without the benefit of knowing one another personally or knowing anything about one another’s context and lives. Emojis, emoticons, and exclamation points make it a little less likely tone will be misread. 

Making Peace with Emojis

I learned to write at a time when exclamation points were considered weak, as good writing in itself ought to convey the emotion. So part of me dislikes the trend toward shorter communication that requires multiple exclamation points and emojis. But I’ve taken to using them so there is less chance of misunderstanding. And, as with email, I reread what I type into social media platforms several times before sharing. As a corollary, if something someone else writes strikes me as offensive, I try to assume the best of all possible intentions by the writer. All of this involves effort, but in the end the chance to communicate with so many people I’d never have met in an age of more limited means of communication makes it worth it the effort.

What are your thoughts on today's methods of communication? Feel free to use emojis below!!

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Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews of M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) books and movies, click here to join her email list and receive free a short horror story, Ninevah, published exclusively to M.O.S.T. subscribers.

Entrepreneur Or Ne're Do Well?

A boyfriend I had in my early twenties was a hard worker but did not like his job. He had no interest in going to college, and he was unimpressed by how long it took most people to build businesses from the ground up, so he looked into various get-rich quick-schemes. He purchased a series of books on how to buy a house with no money down, fix it up and rent it out, then use equity in the first house to help buy another, and so on. The idea was not to earn income through rentals but to sell after a few years and reap a profit due to market appreciation. The system the books described supposedly made people into millionaires. Though I earned barely more than minimum wage myself and wasn't a business or finance major, I enjoyed reading personal finance books (a little odd for a college student, I know), but the ones I read were far less sensational and less expensive, as I got them at the local library. (I've been a fan of libraries all my life, as I wrote in a previous entry.) I had serious questions about the scheme. It's hard to imagine now, but mortgage interest rates then averaged around 13%, and reputable lenders required 20% down in cash. But the author, my boyfriend assured me, was a millionaire, so the system must work. When I found out the books cost over $700 and the author also offered seminars all over the country for an additional thousand or two, I suspected I knew how he'd become a millionaire, and it wasn't by selling houses.

My current favorite writing space/office.

That experience is one reason I had mixed feelings when, about a month ago, I considered updating my profession on Linked In and other social media sites to include the word “entrepreneur.” For so long, for me that word called up images either of the boyfriend who preferred not to work or the salesperson hawking pricey no-fail systems for becoming a millionaire. The people I knew who did well in life worked hard at jobs or professions and saved and invested little by little. As I entered my thirties, my view of entrepreneurs didn't change. A good friend married a man who ran various businesses and was always evading bill collectors and always on the verge of the one big deal that would make him rich. Though eventually it meant losing their house, this entrepreneur refused to take any job unless it paid well over a hundred thousand a year. No such job was ever offered to him. I also discovered that if someone described himself in an online dating profile as an entrepreneur, it quite often meant he was a guy who couldn’t or wouldn't hold a job--one my mother would have called a “ne'er-do-well.” Such men were often charming, but could rarely pay their bills.

I'm sure decades ago there were many actual entrepreneurs--as opposed to people who adopted the label as a cover--I simply didn't do the kind of work that brought me into contact with them. Now I do. As an author who independently publishes my own work and an attorney who runs my own law firm, I keep up with the business world and am on email lists of various entrepreneurs. Today, running a business is probably more common than ever. The Internet empowers many people to work anywhere at any time and to sell products and services all over the world. Yet still there are times I wonder. Some Internet businesses remind me of the house parties my mom went to when I was a kid. Everyone “made money” or got free items attending everyone else’s Tupperware/Pampered Chef/Mary Kay parties. But eventually the circle of friends was exhausted, the round robin ended, and no one was any wealthier, though their kitchens were more organized. (Not an entirely bad thing, but not a basis for a business.)

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Also, while some author/entrepreneurs I'm familiar with offer a lot of helpful information for free on blogs or in reasonably priced books (say, $3.99-$9.99, not $700), I also get offers from “entrepreneurs” who seem to be making a lot of money selling books about how to sell books or, worse, by giving expensive seminars on how to sell books. When I try to trace back to some other type of book, product, or service the author successfully created and sold, I find only vague references to business experiences that sound suspiciously like college internships. Not to say a college intern might not know something I don't. I'm just not willing to pay upwards of $500 to find out.

On the other hand, I've been enjoying running my own businesses for years, and I hope never to have a job again. Soon after I started my law firm, heavy layoffs during a recession underscored the risk of working for just one employer. And I love that the Internet makes it possible for many authors to sell to the public, offering their work for less than a traditional publisher would charge, but earning more than a traditional publisher would pay while doing so. Also important to me is that running my own writing business means choosing the strategy and making the decisions. Or, as entrepreneur and author Joanna Penn puts it, never having to ask permission. If I think something is a good idea--say, writing and publishing a religious conspiracy thriller series without adopting a male pen name--I can go ahead and do it without seeking anyone’s approval. Yes, I take the risk it won’t work, but if that happens, I learn from the experience and try something else rather than, as usually occurs as an employee, being discouraged from innovating again. And if things do work out, I gain the reward.

Most of all, it’s fun to wear different hats throughout a day, week, and year. Nearly every job I’ve had, my main reason for leaving was that I got tired of doing the same thing over and over. Now there is always a new book to write, an innovative marketing approach to learn, an emerging creative outlet to explore. So, in the end, I decided to embrace the term entrepreneur.

What are your thoughts on entrepreneurs? What do you associate with the term? Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur? Please share in the comments below. Also, if you’d like to keep up on my creative and business endeavors, you can join my email list. No pitches to buy $700 books, I promise.

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Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews of M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) books and movies, join her email list and receive free a short horror story, Ninevah, published exclusively to M.O.S.T. subscribers.

6 Things I Learned In The Last Year About Writing And Business

During much of the last fourteen years, I worked full-time--and then some--as a lawyer and wrote fiction on the side. Last year, I gradually shifted gears so that now more than half my professional life is devoted to writing and to the business side of writing. Below are a few things I've learned along the way.

Get Out:  Getting outside once a day, no matter what the weather, boosts my mental health. Much as writing all day at an antique desk in my home office sounds appealing when it's ten degrees with a six below windchill (can you tell I live in Chicago?), if I stay inside too much, I start feeling blue. I'm also less creative and less motivated. So if I'm working from home more than a day or two in a row, I make sure I meet someone for lunch, lug my laptop to the local coffeehouse, or at least walk a few blocks to the Container Store to admire the many wondrous things there. Despite the time it takes to layer on a fleece, winter coat, scarf, and double gloves (when it's zero or colder), I feel energized and ready to get back to work when I get home.

Flexibility:  For years (actually, decades), I wrote, submitted manuscripts, and ascended the rejection ladder, graduating from form letters to personal notes to publication of some short stories, poems, and articles. I took a few breaks when my law practice became extremely busy and after my parents' deaths. When I came back and needed to decide what to do with my most recently-completed novel, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about authors having success with self-publishing. I hesitated because in my mind that wasn't "real" publishing. But the more I researched, the more excited I became. I believe in my work, and rather than spending so much energy and time persuading others to invest in it, I decided to bet on myself. Now my marketing time goes toward reaching readers directly. Likewise, I discovered I need to be flexible about genre. I think of my Awakening series as a thriller series despite occult elements, as it contains relatively little of the type of gore that's common these days in horror. (Though I disagree that gore is required.) Yet the books sell well when listed in Amazon's horror category. When my first fan email came in, it was from readers who love science fiction, a genre in which I hadn't imagined the books directly fit. That's when I realized that, by not reaching sci fi and other genre readers, I was missing entire audience sections.

Amazon helps those who help themselves: The more I do to advertise and promote my books, the more Amazon does to promote them and the more sales rise. This is a great relief. When I started running ads for The Awakening, I rarely recovered the price of the ad. Now ads in smaller publications nearly always pay for themselves, and an ad in a publication with a large subscription base such as BookBub usually earns me much more than it costs within the first day, plus prompts a string of sales for weeks to come. Having a second book in the series adds to this effect. While I'm sure longevity and past sales must be factored into Amazon's algorithms, this also reflects a larger truth in any business. At first, a huge amount of time and effort is spent getting the word out. But if you have a good product, eventually others start selling it for you. Not as a favor but because, if they are customers, they truly love the product and want to share it with others and, if they are vendors, because you are showing you can help make them money.

Consistency matters: There is a great quote that I don't remember word-for-word in Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. It goes something like "you are what your habits make you, and you can choose your habits." I thought of this as I began devoting more time and effort to writing and publishing. How does it relate? For the majority of authors, writing one book and publishing it on Amazon results in little more than a handful of sales to family and friends. Likewise, writing a blog post or two, occasionally tweeting, and creating a webpage won't sustain a career or a business. It's the effort that's made week after week, month after month, and year after year that has the most effect. Writing in particular is something a lot of people love doing, as is playing sports. That means for authors and athletes (and singers and actors and visual artists), there is a lot of competition. That doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing. It does mean a successful career will likely require effort day after day for years. This is something I keep in mind every time I read an "overnight" success story. Usually further research reveals that the novel the person wrote and sold a hundred thousand copies of was the fifth one that person finished, and the stunning sales record came not because of one ad but after months or years of seeking reviews from book bloggers, attending and speaking at conferences, and finding creative ways to reach readers.

No one owes it to me to be excited about what I'm doing: There are certain things that almost everyone in our culture universally expresses excitement about when women do them--mainly getting married and having children. Beyond that, it varies. For example, some people feel earning an advanced degree is a great accomplishment, others scoff at "professional students." When it comes to writing and particularly an author independently publishing her own work, there will always be people eager to downplay any success, or who view all artistic efforts as too much of a long shot to be worth noting. At first those attitudes surprised and disappointed me. Then I realized that everyone is entitled to her or his own opinion, and I don't need to share it, be concerned about it, or factor it into how I live my life. What's important is doing my best at what I love doing.

Many talented people are generous with their time and information: This is the flip side of the point above. For every person who is dismissive of self-publishing, there are three or four who freely offer information, advice, and support. I've learned tremendous amounts about writing, business, and marketing from blogs and websites created by authors like Nick Stephenson, Joanna Penn, Bob Mayer, and Melissa Foster. I've also joined on-line communities where authors share what they've learned about writing, editing, and marketing. I had this same experience when I started my own law practice after many years of working at a large firm. It reaffirms my faith in human nature and in the value of being kind, professional, and considerate. It is almost always returned tenfold.

Questions or comments on these points or a few to add of your own? Please comment below or email me at lisa@lisalilly.com.
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Lisa M. Lilly is the author of occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous print and on-line magazines, including Parade of Phantoms, Strong Coffee, and Hair Trigger, and a short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases, click here to join her email list. The Awakening series is also available on barnesandnoble.com.

5 Ways to Be More Productive -- And More Relaxed -- In The New Year

Relax -- unlike some articles on productivity, the suggestions below are not meant to help you do more than you’re doing now. Instead, I hope they will help you enjoy your work more, relax more, and open up a little extra free time in the new year.

1.  Know your best times of day for different tasks

Our brains work differently at different times of the day. Figuring out the ideal time to perform a task can make it more enjoyable and lessen the amount of time you spend on it. Most people are more creative in the afternoon or evening. That’s because they're a little fatigued, so their minds tend to wander, which leads to new ideas. For that reason, a first draft, whether of a business memo, a short story, or a legal brief, will flow more easily in the afternoon. In contrast, for most people, the morning is a better time for tasks that require focus and precision. (Interestingly, one study showed this was true even for individuals who reported they were not “morning people.”) So revise that first draft or proofread your near-final document in the morning.

2.  Focus on large blocks of time

Business/self-help guru Tony Robbins once said that most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten. The same thing tends to be true for a week versus a month, particularly when you’re very busy. If your days feel booked to the hilt, setting more daily or even weekly goals will just add stress. Instead, take a few minutes to consider what you can reasonably get done in a month or a year. Let’s say you want to find a new job but have no time to look. Choose one task per month to further that goal. Maybe in Month 1, spend an hour total talking with two people who already have the type of position you want; in Month 2, spend an hour researching ideal companies; in Month 3 update your resume, etc. Will you have a new job at the end of the year? Maybe, maybe not, but you’ll have made substantial progress. As another example, if you’ve wanted for years to write fiction, try setting a goal of writing just 250 words 10 times over the next three months. At the end of that time, you’ll have a 2,500 word short story (which you can then edit in the mornings).   

3.  Schedule important meetings with yourself

There’s an old saying that if you want something done, ask a busy person. If that’s you, schedule time for yourself, even if it’s only once a week or once a month, and treat it like any other important appointment. In other words, if someone wants to set something else at that time, you are not available. (No one needs to your important meeting is with yourself.) What to do in that time? Whatever you need most. Spend half an hour with a cup of tea and plan your next month’s personal goals. Take a walk, meditate, or sneak away to a coffee shop (don’t bring your tea with in that case) to read a book. But do something just for you – not for your boss, your employees, your spouse, your kids, your neighbor….



4.  Expect to be interrupted/frustrated/for things to take longer than you expected

Especially when we’re busy, there's a tendency to schedule everything to the minute. What that really means is we’re assuming all will go smoothly. Every conference call will start and end on time, every software download will finish in the estimated time, and the car will never break down. When does life work that way? It doesn’t. So don’t start the software download when you know you’ll need your computer half an hour later. If you are stuck with back-to-back meetings, leave a half hour somewhere in the day to catch up. For a one p.m. meeting that’s a 30-minute drive away, block out the time from noon on in your calendar. (You still won’t leave until 12:15, but at least you’ll have an extra 15 minutes if the route includes a detour.) This will give you breathing room to still get most things done on time and will ease stress. When the computer crashes, you can say to yourself, “Oh, yes, I knew that could happen. Good thing I I started this at 6 p.m. and I can go grab dinner while it reboots.”

5.  Make your own rules

For a short time, I tried the OHIO system – Only Handle It Once. It sounded great – why waste time, for instance, looking at each e-mail two-three times in a day. On a slow day, responding to each e-mail as it came in saved time and lowered stress. But if I had a day that started with 30 emails and 50 more came in later, it was a different story. If the 1st required me to complete a half hour task in order to respond but wasn’t urgent and the 25th needed an immediate answer that would take five minutes, OHIO was a terrible idea. Not only would I give poor service to the client who sent No. 25, I’d feel extremely stressed while I spent half an hour on a non-urgent task without knowing what those other twenty-four emails required. Someone in another kind of business, though, might find OHIO useful in most circumstances. This shows that, with any rule or idea, including the suggestions above, it’s important to see how it fits your work habits and your life. And, as important, see how you feel as you go through your day. If it works, great. If not, you can make adjustments.

What’s helped you both relax and be productive?

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Lisa M. Lilly is an attorney and the author of Amazon occult best seller The Awakening. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous print and on-line magazines, including Parade of Phantoms, Strong Coffee, and Hair Trigger, and a short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. She is currently working on The Awakening, Book II: The Unbelievers.

The Awakening for Kindle: http://amzn.to/pFCcN6

For Nook: http://bit.ly/15bViBm

For Kobo: http://bit.ly/1gTrxdW

The Military, Make Up, and Rereading Katniss (Favorite Books Post No. 1)

Recently I reread the Hunger Games trilogy. It was great fun, and the themes seemed particularly timely. (I'll do my best not to spoil any of the plot for those who haven't read the whole trilogy.)

(1) Women in Combat: In the Hunger Games, each combatant (known as a tribute) competes to become the sole survivor. The arena for the games changes from year to year and even within each game. A combatant might face mountains, drought, fire, floods, or all of the above. Author Suzanne Collins does an excellent job of showing how each challenge requires different skills and traits. In one scenario, being a fast swimmer is the most important skill, and brute strength provides little or no advantage. In some parts of the game, a young, small tribute outwits and outmaneuvers larger, stronger and tougher opponents because she's stealthy and quick and can swing from treetop to treetop without being noticed. Knowing what plants can be eaten and having the skill to distinguish between ones that are medicinal and ones that are poisonous also can be vital -- another skill that has nothing to do with strength or size. While The Hunger Games and its sequels are fiction, they raise good questions about what makes someone able to handle combat situations or survive in hostile territory. That seems appropriate at a time when the U.S. is inching toward allowing women in combat positions for the first time.

(2) The Importance of Appearances: Before they compete, tributes undergo a rigorous remake of their images, and those images are vital in getting sponsors. Sponsors are people with money who send tributes things they need to survive during the Games. The boy tributes have style consultants just as the girls do. But the girls are subjected to more intense treatments that generally do nothing to help them in combat. While she's being put through hours of waxing, eyebrow tweezing and skin polishing, Katniss reflects on how her male counterpart, Peeta, has this same time free. He can rest or eat during those hours to build his strength, train longer to hone his skills, or schmooze with potential sponsors. This echoes U.S. culture, though obviously the books present this in a larger and more dramatic way. But studies show that women who wear make up are viewed as more professional than those who don't, leaving women who choose not to use cosmetics at a disadvantage. Then there's wardrobe. For men, the standard business attire is a neutral suit and tie or, for business casual, a long-sleeve shirt and khaki pants. There is no neutral for women. A skirt suit can be too girly, a pants suit too manly, a gray outfit too boring, a fuschia blouse too frivolous. (Think of the 2008 primaries -- no one commented on John McCain's or Barack Obama's pants suits.) My routine is pretty basic, and I still spend about 20 minutes every morning on hair, make up and clothing choices, 20 minutes my male colleagues don't need to spend. That's over 120 hours a year, the equivalent of 2-3 work weeks. I could take a vacation, earn another 3/4 of a month's pay, or finish rewrites on my current novel in that time. Not to mention what cosmetics cost. I spend an average $30 a month on cosmetics and skincare. That's $360 a year, which would buy a plane ticket for that vacation.

(3) Likeability: Much of the preparation of Katniss for the Hunger Games involves making her likeable so she can attract sponsors. Katniss is fierce, stubborn, smart, strong and resourceful. All great qualities for survival, and if she were a boy, particularly a large boy, those qualities would get her sponsors. Everyone likes to bet on a winner. As a girl, though, she needs to project vulnerability, niceness (even to the people who are orchestrating a game whose aim is to kill children), and loveability, regardless whether the boys she competes against project those qualities or whether those qualities in themselves will help her win. This reflects many real women's experiences. Women are generally raised to place a premium on relationships, being nice, and being liked. Indeed, many women report being told by strangers on the street to smile if they look too serious or stern, something I suspect never happens to men. Similarly, when men are demanding bosses, take hardline positions, or grab the spotlight in meetings, these qualities are seen as signs of strength and leadership. Women who exhibit these behaviors are more often seen as too aggressive, and aggression is almost always viewed negatively in women. At the same time, women are instructed that to get ahead, they must adopt male body language (see, for example,
10 Common Body Language Traps for Women in the Workplace) or typically male approaches to business to succeed (see Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office).

The reality is, as in The Hunger Games, different qualities, strategies and skills work for different people at different times. There is no one "right" way to behave in every situation. But because the standard for so long has been based on how men behave, women still struggle either to show how they match the male model or why their approach is just as effective. (For a good book about women, men and leadership, check out Closing the Leadership Gap by Marie C. Wilson.)

As a writer, I aim for my work to entertain and intrigue first. Then I hope that after readers close the book, questions and ideas linger about the conflicts the characters faced and how they reflect the real world. I admire the way Suzanne Collins manages that throughout the Hunger Games books without slowing the story for a second.

What are you favorite thrillers, and how do they reflect the larger world around us?

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Lisa M. Lilly is the author of Amazon occult best seller The Awakening. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous print and on-line magazines, including Parade of Phantoms, Strong Coffee, and Hair Trigger. She is currently working on The Awakening, Book II: The Unbelievers.

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Visit Lisa's website:  www.lisalilly.com