My new book, Betting Blind, is about a women, a female Don Juan, who preys on the lonely using computer dating sites. I’ve been researching how unsuspecting people can lose their shirts to the unscrupulous. With very little information  my Donna Juan can reach into her victims’ bank accounts, their mail, their entire e-presence.

Over dinner last weekend a friend of ours told us that computer firewalls had become obsolete. Why? It’s far more likely that our computers will be hacked through social engineering. Social engineering, as defined by Wikipedia, is the art of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information… it is typically trickery or deception for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or computer system access.

What I find fascinating about this whole field of criminal behavior is how it’s accomplished by trickery and not by blunt force. I’m starting to get my own ideas…

I found some great examples of social engineering here: “Social Engineering: The Basics”.

Who knows what another person’s  life is really like? It’s the chief reason I love mystery. Seeing justice served is all very well, but what I’m really interested in is peering under the hood of my fellow human’s life and seeing the inner workings of an outwardly perfect life. And it’s never Norman Rockwell, baby.

Get home from December gridlock traffic, the endless shopping and errand running and curl up to a Christmas murder.

Here’s some of my favorites:
Murder for Christmas,  by Agatha Christie
The Shortest Day, by Jane Langton
Death of a Fool, by Ngaio Marsh
Mistletoe Mayhem, edited by Richard Dalby
Holmes for the Holidays, edited by Martin H Greenberg, J Lellenberg and Carol Waugh
A Rumpole Christmas, by John Mortimer
Murder for Christmas, edited by Thomas Godfrey

Check out these wonderful interviews about creativity—wonderful out-of-the-box thinking.
http://ttbook.org/book/jonah-lehrer-imagine-how-creativity-works
http://ttbook.org/book/austin-kleon-steal-artist
http://ttbook.org/book/kenneth-goldsmith-uncreative-writing

“Mirror, Mirror” is the first of two offerings this spring of the Snow White story. The second film, starring Charlize Theron, is a darker, edgier version of the old tale.

Someone on the radio, I didn’t catch her name, was speculating why Snow White is replacing the Cinderella story told, told and re-told throughout the eighties. She pointed to our youth culture and the Boomers’ obsession with health, fitness, botox, etc-you-get-the-picture. No longer do older women look older the way they did back in the old days.

I think  that the  Snow White story points to the increasing tensions between the Boomers and the Gen-Xers and Millennials. The perception is that the Boomers hold nearly all the money and the power and most of them refuse to retire leaving the youngsters asking if you want whip on your mocha. And when they DO retire they’ll bleed the social security fund dry. It’s enough to make a person give up and take a nap. Well, at  least Snow White has her youth and beauty.

Who knew that George Costanza could be so right?
According to Michael Shermer  citing Robert Trivers’s “The Folly of Fools”, liars need to practice keeping their voices in a lower register, maintaining eye contact, and controlling their gestures so that they don’t appear nervous. And liars need to think harder than truthful people to keep their story both plausible and consistent. But all of that hard work  isn’t necessary if you believe the lie.

As a fiction writer I’ve seen first-hand how my memories can be replaced by fictionalized versions as I write draft after draft of a story.

I’m really excited about this year’s Oscars. Billy Crystal as host—yay! I’ve dusted off the popcorn maker and read all the movie gossip about who’s going to win what.
Word on the street is  “The Artist” will win Best Picture. But if Omer Mozzaffar, “How to Win An Academy Award”,  is correct this most coveted prize goes to the story that follows the hero’s journey. You  know, hero gets the call to action, resists but capitulates, goes on a journey, encounters the evil one, does battle, yada yada.
But wait a minute,  “The Artist” is very French and the French don’t give a rip about the hero’s journey.

My hero the sublime Elmore Leonard inspired this latest writing contest: write one sentence breaking all or as many of Leonard’s ten rules of writing as you can. In case you’re unfamiliar with his rules, here they are:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the word “said.”
5. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
6. Keep your exclamation points under control.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Send your entry by midnight February 1, 2012 along with your postal address to: Day6@CBC.ca, The subject line should read “Elmore.”

Good luck and may the worst writer win.

Turns out reading Lee Child may be more beneficial than reading back issues of The Wall Street Journal or that three volume biography of Benjamin Franklin your brother-in-law gave you for Christmas.

Anne Kreamer makes a compelling argument for reading fiction in The Harvard Business Review: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/01/the_business_case_for_reading.html

Stories are like computer simulations only for understanding human nature.  Our brains actually fire up as if we were actually experiencing Stories teach us to empathize with people who are different from us, and as a result of reading fiction we become more open-minded and socially intelligent.

For those of you who know me personally and are wondering why I’m reading The Harvard Business Review——it’s all research, baby.

Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen “Young Adult”, my thoughts won’t make any sense and they’ll blow the big undeserved plot surprise.

Was it my imagination or did Charlize Theron look super disappointed for not winning the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy? She was brilliant as Mavis Gary in Young Adult— both funny and horrifying as the high school prom queen who never grew up.

If there’s fault with the story, it’s not with the acting but with the writing. Diablo Cody, the very talented screenwriter of Juno who wrote Young Adult, has received a lot of praise for her out-of-the-box story. Cody claims she set out to break all the tropes about this kind of comedy: beautiful bitch goddess forced to face her weaknesses plus big city folks who go back to their humble beginnings and are humbled. Only it doesn’t work.

It did work for me until we get to the baby naming party and then it’s what the what??? Ms. Cody totally did not set us up for the information bomb she sets off at the party.

C’mon Diablo, it’s one thing to break rules but you just bumped me out of the fictive dream here. If Mavis was indeed pregnant then her ex-boyfriend is not only clueless, he’s heartless. And why does Mavis never react to the countless baby references until we get to the party? I call foul.

Why do I read about people murdering each other???  I’m not a sociopath, I swear.

Okay, I admit to a little neurosis. And there’s nothing I like better than to read about dysfunctional relationships. Parents, siblings, children, not to mention in-laws—then there’s bosses, bitchy co-workers, that guy at the neighborhood association who complains to the board if your grass grows higher than three inches. Take dysfunction out to its suburban reaches and you have murder. And don’t I love to see a boss get what’s coming to him.

But the murder is only the starting point. Because no matter what kind of bastard got his comeuppance and how well deserved it was, the murderer always, always gets caught. And it’s like dude, couldn’t you have begged off the Christmas holiday / quit the job / broke up with her? In a mystery, we can count on the detective finding the murderer and bringing him to justice.

No matter how many blinds the murderer constructs, no matter how many theories the detective entertains, eventually she uncovers the truth.  Robert McKee, in his book, Story, said: “In the ritual of story we continuously see through faces and activities of characters to depths of the unspoken, the unaware.” As we go through life, we realize how inscrutable we all are. What we show our co-workers or even our intimates is not the raw, unembellished self. The mystery’s conceit is to peel away those concealments. I can’t think of anything more satisfying.

James N. Frey, author of How to Write a Damn Good Mystery, has this theory: “In a mystery, death which to all of us seems so arbitrary and irrational, is made logical and rational. The hero, using reason, triumphs over irrational death in a symbolic way.”  Jim quotes Robert Parker (beloved writer of the Spenser series) as saying, “the mystery novel is one of the last refuges of the hero.” In our culture of disgraced leaders we need more stories of people overcoming obstacles, even danger, to right a wrong.