Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Tess Gerritsen, who is the New York Times bestselling author of The Rizzoli & Isles series with Listen to Me returning on July 5th. These books have inspired a TNT television series, over 40 million copies have been sold, and this is the 13th installment in this series. First of all, I think as a writer, how do you keep something fresh when you've been working with these characters for so long?
Tess: It's sometimes a challenge, and I think what helps is to have a universe of characters. So you're not just dealing with one or two people, you also have the people around them - Jane's partner, Barry Frost, and Jane's mom and Jane's family. It's like a soap opera in some ways, because everybody's life is at a different point in every different book.
Mindy: I think it can be really helpful as an author, considering them as real people all the time, moving through real lives.
Tess: Right, you can't have them static. So in the course of these 13 books, we've seen Jane go from a single cop to married to a mom, and unfortunately, her pregnancy, I think took four books. Yeah, we've watched Maura fall in love and out of love and get into romantic issues. We've watched Jane's mother, who started off as a devoted wife and mom, suddenly get divorced when her husband left her, and now we're looking at her at a different stage in her life. So it is like real life. You watch your friends get older and you watch their changes, and it's always interesting.
Mindy: And speaking of Jane's mother, she is a fan favorite for sure, Angela, and she gets a mystery of her own in this installment.
Tess: That's right. I hadn't expected to write another Rizzoli & Isles book, which it explains the five-year gap, but Jane's mother started to speak to me in my head. She's always been a fun character for me, and I've loved watching her bloom as her husband left her and now she's finding her own feet. So Angela began to speak with her Boston accent, "If you see something, say something." And I thought, "Well, what is she seeing?" She lives in a suburban street, a little bit north of Boston, and it's a quiet neighborhood, and new neighbors have moved in across the street. But they are strange people. They keep their curtains drawn. They're installing bars on the windows, and Angela wants to know what is going on there. So that becomes her little investigation, which her daughter kindof poo-poos because it's just Mom.
Mindy: Right. That five-year gap - what is that like to return to these characters after such a long time?
Tess: It was fun to see what they're up to now. You get to see little bits of Maura as well, which I hadn't revealed. We know from earlier books that Maura does play the piano. She has a piano in her house, and we get to see her perform at a doctor's concert where she is a soloist and it reveals another part of her life or about her personality anyway. Maura is a perfectionist. She cannot stand to be publicly embarrassed. So this concert is a great deal of stress on her and just tells you a little bit more about this fairly complex and very self-contained character.
Mindy: You yourself, of course, have a background as a physician, and I kind of had an unusual route to a writing career, so my audience is mostly writers. If you could talk a little bit about how you came out of one professional world into another.
Tess: Writers come from all professions. Young people ask me, "What should I do to become a writer?" I tell them, number one is to live your life and to remember your experiences and to use that in your writing. I just happen to have a background in medicine. I wanted to be a writer when I was very young. I was seven years old, and I told my father I was gonna write Nancy Drew type books when I grew older. And he said, "That's no way to make a living." So being from an immigrant family where security is really important, he asked me, just think about science. I loved science already. I was interested in Biology, so going to medical school wasn't that much of a detour. But when I was in medical school and going through medical training, I knew that I was still a writer, and I would write short stories in my spare time. When I went on maternity leave with my first son, and I had a couple of months home, that's when I really got serious and wrote my first book. I know people are going, "wait, you had a newborn. How did you do that?" I had a newborn who slept a lot. So I was blessed in that way. He slept all the time, and I was able to dig into my writing. So that's how I got back into it. A couple of years later, I sold my first book to Harlequin Intrigue, which is a romantic suspense publisher. It was fun. It was great training. I wrote eight of those books.
Mindy: It is a very good example of how to, as you said, live your life. I absolutely love that advice. People ask me too, often, "how do you become a writer?" Of course, but also, what are those steps? And I think that it is imperative all the time to be aware that writing is part of the entertainment industry, and you don't have any more guarantees of success in that then you do of saying, I want to become a rock star or a famous actress or a professional athlete. It is very difficult. I think because it feels more accessible than those other things, I think a lot of the time people feel like the barrier to entry might be a little bit lower. Well, I always tell people that writing needs to be plan B. You have to be able to pay your bills, and there are no guarantees of success. So you obviously took the route of going to medical school. I have a degree in English Literature and Philosophy & Religion. So while I didn't necessarily go like a super useful route, I did end up working as a librarian for 14 years. And I just think it's very important to kinda walk that fine line between never giving up on your dreams, but also being aware that we do live in reality and our bodies need shelter and food.
Tess: Right. Well, the great thing about writing is that you can do it on the side. It needn't be your profession when you start off. You're a librarian. I know people who are airline mechanics and geologists. Every one of those people, they have a story to tell about their own profession. I, as a consumer of entertainment or a reader, love to get an inside look at places that I don't get to see. How does the geologist think when he goes walking through the woods and he sees something? There are so many puzzles that they can solve that I cannot. So I would love to read a book about a geologist who solves mysteries, or a librarian who sees something in the stacks that ends up being really important, or who has obscure knowledge that may just be the clue. So it's important to earn a living, to feed yourself, but also remember that while you're feeding yourself, you're learning things, you're experiencing things that nobody else knows, and that can go into a book.
Mindy: Yes, and speaking about things that people know or don't know, I'm sure that you run into this a lot, probably as you said a consumer, even before you were writing yourself. But as a person with a medical background, you have the opportunity to write the medical world correctly. But how often did you have experiences where you're reading something or you're watching TV and you're just like, "Oh no, that's really wrong?"
Tess: Yeah, all the time. All the time. And it's important also to know that writers make mistakes. I'm sure I make mistakes all the time, and an alert reader or a reader who's got a bee in his bonnet is going to tell you. They're gonna write you and tell you you made a mistake on that firearm, and that seems to be the number one source of mistakes for mystery writers - firearms. We always get something wrong, and the gun people will tell us, "No, you didn't - you got your caliber wrong, and there's no safety on that gun." The mistakes we make are the ones that we don't know, we don't know. I had a throwaway detail about a man who had a car in his barn that hadn't been driven. I just said it was a 1945 Ford. I got so many letters from people writing back to me and saying, "Don't you know they didn't make cars that year because we were finishing up the war?" And I didn't know that, but a lot of people did.
Mindy: Yeah, it's funny the things that you will be caught out on, and I certainly don't mind when people catch me on things, but it's embarrassing. Yes, 1945 they didn't make cars. I wouldn't know that. I don't think that many people would. I have never been near an ocean. I live in Ohio, we are super land-locked. When I was writing the end of one of my books, my characters are standing out on a beach out on the West Coast, and the sun is rising. So all the rays are bouncing off of the water. They're saying their goodbyes. It’s like a mother and daughter and she rides off... Well, not into the sunset, 'cause it's in the wrong part of the sky. What's funny, and you know because you live in this world, is that that made it through editing. It made it through proofreading. It made it through copy editing. It made it through everything. It made it to print.
Tess: Oh my gosh. Oh yes, that's scary.
Mindy: The sun came up on the wrong side of the world, and literally - and what's funny too, is that I've only had one or two people say something to me about it, so.
Tess: Well, the copy editor was probably asleep at the switch on that one.
Mindy: I mean, I would like to think that they were so wrapped up in the story that they did not notice the sun coming up in the wrong part of the sky. That's pretty big. That's a big boo-boo. I don't know if you experienced this as well. I notice things, and it doesn't necessarily have to be something I know because of my environment or my background, listeners are probably tired of hearing this, but I grew up in the Midwest, and I live on a farm and farming is always wrong. I notice things because I am a writer and because I do watch my own Ps and Qs so closely. I was listening to an audio book the other day, which is also a different experience, so you notice things. There was a door. It was an exterior door of a house and it was opening the wrong direction. Someone was trapped inside and they were trying to get out and they kept ramming their shoulder into the door. And I'm like, "Well, that's why it's not working dude, you can't...
Tess: Yeah, pull, don't push. I know.
Mindy: So do you find that sometimes that clinical eye, the editorial eye that you turn on yourself while you're working can interfere with your actual enjoyment of just reading?
Tess: You know, not very often. I don't read that many medical thrillers, maybe that's why. It's a little bit like returning to work when you read something that has to do with your profession. I wonder if that's true for other people. They don't like to read about their own profession because it feels like going back to work? It's part of the reason I don't watch medical shows on television. I get anxious. I don't really read the stuff that I would catch mistakes in, but when I do catch it, I think, "Oh." If it was a big error, I thought I would think, "Oh, you just didn't talk to the right people."
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Mindy: When it comes to obviously writing your own books, you have that background. Do you end up running into areas where you need to do a little bit more research yourself or you've got to brush up a particular arena?
Tess: Oh yes, absolutely. I wrote a book back in 1999 called Gravity, which was set aboard the International Space Station. It was a medical thriller set in space, and that took two years of nothing but research. Going to NASA. Reading everything I could about medicine in microgravity. And I had as my premise that there is a series of disasters or a Titanic of space where everything goes wrong on ISS. Well, to know how everything goes wrong, you need to know how everything goes right first. How do things work? I got down to downloading blueprints of the International Space Station, which hadn't even been launched yet, and talking to medical doctors who work in aerospace medicine about the finer details of how do you do code blue when there's no gravity and how everything changes in space. That was very research-heavy, and the whole time I was terrified I was gonna make a huge mistake, but apparently, I didn't. It was probably the biggest challenge of any book I've had to write, having to do with research. I've also done some historical medicine in 1830, and that was another deep dive into things I didn't know about. I ended up buying antiquarian books, medical books from the 1810s, 1820s. How do you amputate an arm without anesthesia? And these old medical textbooks, oh my gosh, they were like computer manuals. They would tell you how many people you needed to hold down the patient. How you keep them under control, where you tie them down, because of course they're gonna be screaming and thrashing. How do you go about cutting off an arm? These are details that made it into the book because they were so dramatic. It was horrifying research, but it was also fascinating.
Mindy: Yes, absolutely. I remember reading a book. It's just called Birth, and it's just about the history of giving birth. Dear God, how are any of us still here?
Tess: Right, I know. Once you've had a baby, that's like, "Why would you wanna have another one?"
Mindy: Oh my Lord. I'm interested too, because one of my books is set in 1890 and it deals a little bit with medical elements, although it's more of like mental health, medical procedures in asylums. When you were writing and reading about medicine in 1830s, was your experience along the lines of, man, this is barbaric, or was it more like when you're doing your research, you're like and they were doing the best they could with what they had.
Tess: It was barbaric. It really was. You were better off not going to a doctor in 1820, especially if you were about to give birth. Lots of cases of child bed fever. Women just got infected while giving birth and they died, and they almost invariably died once they were infected. And the barbaric part of it is that they wouldn't have died if they had just given birth in the fields. It was doctors who are introducing these infections. Not washing their hands. Infecting women, whole wards of women, who would all then proceed to die. So it was, yeah, you were better off having your baby at home. Doctors also had a lot of strange cures and they would give things to cure people and end up poisoning them. In a lot of ways, Mother Nature was kinder than the human medical doctor was.
Mindy: Well, I think especially if you were a woman too, because the doctors were men. And I just remember reading there were men delivering babies that weren't looking because they didn't wanna see a women's genitals and I'm like, okay.
Tess: I guess. How do you do that anyway?
Mindy: Going back then to the medical world. You write medical thrillers. Are you ever going to be interested in writing about Covid or are you just like, you know what, let's leave well enough alone. I don't ever wanna hear this word again.
Tess: I'm avoiding the topic. I have to say that when we're in the midst of something, it's really hard to read about it. And also, we're living it. We all know what it's like. The way I'm handling Covid is in this 13th book, I write about it as if it's in the past. Jane goes in to interview the colleagues of a nurse has just been murdered, and she reflects on the fact that this hospital was a killing ground, just a couple of years ago. People were dying left and right of Covid. But that's about the only mention I have of it other than that nobody shakes hands in this book. That's probably not a safe thing to do anymore. We don't shake hands. And the victim, when she has her autopsy, it's revealed that she has some scarring from Covid pneumonia. But those are the only things that come into the story.
Mindy: When I'm reading, it's interesting to me to see the authorial choices about whether or not they mention it, whether people are wearing masks, whether they just omit it from their fantastical world entirely. I have not written it into any of my books yet, because in my worlds where I don't have to deal with reality, I go there for a reason. I don't know that I want to willingly take that with me.
Tess: Yeah, yeah.
Mindy: Like I said, you've been writing 13 books now in this series, and you have a duo at work here. When you're writing your different characters, how do you keep things balanced between Maura and Jane and do you consider fan favorites? Is there a preference? Do you get mail or have people contact either like, I want more of Jane.
Tess: Yes, you can't keep the balance. There are some books that are very more eccentric, and there are some books that really focus on Jane. Trying to keep the balance, to me, feels like turning it into a scientific equation. That's not really art because, as we know, our lives, sometimes one family is having a drama while the other one's relatively serene. So that's the way I've been handling it. This, I like to focus on one character's particular crisis. My book, Ice Cold, where Maura gets stranded in an abandoned town in Wyoming. Obviously that's gonna be Maura's story because she's the one who is facing the danger. And Jane's part in that that is, "How do I rescue Maura?" This particular book, it's more focused on Jane and her mother, Angela, because the theme has to do with mothers and daughters. When do we stop listening to our mothers? Maybe we shouldn't stop listening to our mothers, and I wanted to really focus on that relationship. Now Maura does have a role in it, and I know I'm gonna be getting letters from readers going, I want more Maura. You can't always make that balance happen.
Mindy: I agree. One of my favorite duos of all time, I love The X-Files. I never missed an episode. And there were great episodes that would focus more on Scully or more on Mulder. And I remember one in particular where Mulder is in the field and he's entirely alone and he keeps calling Scully, and she's like on vacation or something. And it's just her answering the phone every now and then. And then she's like, "Do you need me there?" And he's like, "No, no, it's okay." And it was really just kind of wonderful to see each of them developing apart from one another.
Tess: Yeah, right, I know. And the thing is, you can't write to please your fans because there will always be people who want more Jane, people want more Maura. And you can't please them both.
Mindy: I agree, and as a consumer in the world where we have instant feedback on social media, I have become in frustrated watching TV shows, in particular, but watching fan catering. I think about the writers, especially in a TV room, who probably wanna tear their hair out because I want things to be organic. I want things to happen as they, quote/unquote, should naturally. And I want the story to follow the path that is best for the story. And if I had feedback from 8 million people every week that I was being asked to take into consideration or do some bowing to certain elements that fans want to see, I know that, especially in any ensemble TV show, if there's a character that people universally disliked, you can count on them dying. And I don't like knowing that, because as a consumer, I don't get that surprise anymore.
Tess: Yeah, well, that's a big stress of working in entertainment today, is that you do get that instant feedback and it can be brutal. Before we used to have to deal with critics and that was bad too. But now you get nasty emails, you get all kinds of - reader reviews can be pretty bad as well. I try to avoid going on Goodreads because I find that those reviews sometimes are pretty awful. It can get into a writer's headspace and make it difficult to keep on working. That's something we all have to learn to, I guess adjust to, is instant feedback and instant criticism.
Mindy: Speaking of fans, what is up next for you?
Tess: Oh, I'm doing a book that's not a Rizzoli & Isles book. I live in a little village in Maine that's about 5,000 people. I became aware of the fact that there were a lot of retired CIA agents here. What do retired spies get up to? And so the story came to me of one woman who was retired, who finds a body, a dead woman on her driveway, and doesn't know whether this is related to her past work overseas. And she has to call for help from her former colleagues to help her solve this crime. It became fun because it's not just the world of espionage, it's also the world of retirees. It's the world of people who have all this experience under their belt, but have been sent out to pasture.
Mindy: Awesome, that sounds exciting. Why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find the new book, Listen to Me, which goes on sale July 5th.
Tess: Yes, you can find me on my website at Tess Gerritsen dot com. I am on Twitter at at Tess Gerritsen, and you can buy Listen to Me, number 13 in the Rizzoli & Isles book, pretty much everywhere.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.