Elizabeth Zelvin 
Elizabeth Zelvin is a New York City psychotherapist who first said, “I want to be a writer” at the age of seven after reading L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon. She still likes Emily better than Anne of Green Gables. Liz dreamed of publishing her first novel in her twenties, though she’s now relieved that didn’t happen. She majored in English and American Literature in college, but jumped the wall and ran off with genre fiction shortly thereafter—a good thing, because she might otherwise be teaching Deconstruction in one of those M states or I states to this day. Death Will Get You Sober, the first book in her mystery series about recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler, came out on her sixty-fourth birthday. In the meantime, she worked in publishing (bad way to become a writer, but who knew?), got a master’s degree in social work, became a psychotherapist and directed alcohol treatment programs, and for the past dozen years has been working with clients around the world on her online therapy website at LZcybershrink.com. Her publications include two more mystery novels—Death Will Help You Leave Him and, just out, Death Will Extend Your Vacation—a dozen short stories (three nominated for the Agatha Award and another for the Derringer Award for Best Short Story), two books of poetry, a book on gender and addictions, and numerous professional articles. She’s been singing and playing the guitar almost as long as she’s been writing and has just released an album of original songs titled Outrageous Older Woman. You can hear her music and buy the CD or download the songs as mp3s on her music website at lizzelvin.com. She is on Facebook and is active in Sisters and Crime (New York chapter and Guppies), Mystery Writers of America, and on DorothyL. Besides getting published and making the album, experiences she’s glad she’s had in this lifetime include playing cello on the stage at Carnegie Hall (at age twelve), living in West Africa for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Sixties, and flying a plane (she logged a scary and exhilarating thirty hours and is quite happy she never soloed and never got her license). She’s also the doting-to-the-point-of-fatuity grandma of two gorgeous, brilliant, talented, and delightful granddaughters. Liz’s author website is at elizabethzelvin.com. She blogs on Poe’s Deadly Daughters and SleuthSayers.
Can you tell us a bit about the first time your fiction was published –
How did that come about? How do you feel about that piece of work now?
Talent, persistence, and luck—also persistence, persistence, persistence. After 125 agent queries and 35 publisher queries over a three-year period, I rewrote the book at the request of a St. Martin’s editor after the manuscript had been sitting on his desk for two and a half years. Originally, Bruce, my recovering alcoholic protagonist, shared the spotlight with Barbara, the world-class codependent. He suggested I demote Barbara to a sidekick. He was right, but when I emailed to tell him so, he said, “I’m so sorry—I’m leaving publishing to go to law school.” Before he left, he gave the book to the legendary Ruth Cavin, and she took it. I still love the book, and I’m deeply grateful it took so long because it’s a thousand times better than the first draft I could hardly wait to send out.
How have you grown as a writer? What has gotten better? What things have you dropped along the way?
As a lifelong writer and a former professional editor (not of anything you’d want to read—the most memorable was an accounting textbook), I didn’t know that editing fiction requires a different skill set. It took me a long time to become willing to kill my darlings. After a lot of critique and revisions and hearing many writers talk about the dangers of overwriting, one day late in 2006, I finally got it. The cherished phrases and redundancies and descriptions that held back the pace—everything that needed cutting started leaping off the page at me. I still see more material I could cut every time I reread a manuscript, especially if I let some time pass before I look at it again. I didn’t know about pace or what was wrong with backstory. I’ve learned that I have a tendency to start a story or chapter in the middle and go back; it’s much better when I see that and change it so it begins at a point from which I can go forward. For some writers, “was” is the most pernicious little word that they have to watch out for; for me, it’s “had.” I’ve also learned a lot about voice. Bruce’s voice came to me straight from the muse of whatever you call what tugs at your brain until you have to get out of bed and grab a pen or get to the keyboard. Barbara’s emerged when I took her into the third person and made her a lot more over the top and a lot less like me. But I didn’t know I had other voices in me until I started writing short stories outside the series. I’ve even found a couple of killers inside me—though these are invariably women, for what it’s worth.
What is it that kick starts a project for you: a character, a situation, or…?
For me, it seems to start with character. I hear the voices talking in my head, and when they become insistent enough, I have to write what they tell me to. Diego, the young marrano sailor with Columbus who’s appeared in two stories in EQMM and a still unpublished YA novel, appeared in the middle of the night. He kept knocking on the inside of my head, saying, “Let me out! Let me out!” I didn’t want to do it, because I’d never written a historical and I don’t like research, but he wouldn’t let up until I gave in to him.
When doing a series, how “into” the world of that series do you get?
Bruce’s world is pretty much the one I live in: New York City, where people can be real smartasses one moment and filled with compassion and generosity the next, where nobody is horrified by the F word and there’s a whole subculture below the city in the church basements where people are recovering from alcoholism, codependency, and other addictions in twelve-step programs. Diego’s world I had to look up. In fact, I eventually became fascinated by Spain in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella not only expelled the Jews but defeated and kicked out the Moors, and what really happened when Columbus discovered America. My YA, which starts in 1493, is basically about the genocide of the Taino.
What scares you about doing a series?
Only running out of steam, not being able to think of another story and make it work.
What are the advantages/disadvantages of series characters?
The advantage is that they’re already real for you. As soon as mine start talking—in Bruce’s case, wisecracking—in my head, I have something to write about. The other side of the coin is less a disadvantage of series characters than an advantage of writing something new: getting to know characters I didn’t know I also had inside me. The killer characters are one example—if I wanted to write something other than a detective story, I had to get inside a different kind of person. I’ve also found myself creating a different kind of amateur sleuth. In “Shifting Is for the Goyim,” a long story that is due to appear on Untreed Reads, my protagonist is a nice Jewish girl who’s a rising country music star and also happens to be a shapeshifter. I like her a lot and could even see her becoming a series character. That would be possible because her story is not finished, although the murder is solved, at the end of the novella. And it’s desirable because I’d love to go back to her and get to know more about her; she has potential for growth.
What made you choose the setting/era for your novel? Why does this work well for you? Does the setting/era have significance beyond your familiarity with it?
As I said, the Bruce series, set in New York City, is “writing what I know.” The new book, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, takes place in the Hamptons, where Bruce and his friends take shares in a lethal clean and sober group house in Deadhampton (Dedhampton on the tax map). I have a little house at the poor end of East Hampton and spend a lot of time there, especially in the summer. The Hamptons are to some extent an outpost of New York City anyhow, and there are interesting tensions between the locals and the summer people. Besides, part of being a New Yorker is getting out of town once in a while. I’d go nuts if I couldn’t get a dose of clean air and green and ocean and hearing the birds instead of sirens and noisy buses and the neighbors’ radios now and then. With the Columbus material, I knew nothing about the historical setting. But I’m Jewish, and I do know what it feels like to be an outsider in a Christian society. There are a lot of parallels between the Jews and the Taino, and while my first Diego story, “The Green Cross,” took place on the Santa Maria during the first voyage with Columbus as a kindly detective father-figure, the more I learned about my subject and the further I went beyond that initial crossing, the more I realized I was really writing about a bigger kind of injustice and a setting and period that a lot of people get wrong.
How do you get into the mindset of your characters? How do you get to know them so that you can do this?
For me, it’s all intuitive. Once or twice I’ve tried to plan secondary characters in advance, and it doesn’t work for me. I know Bruce and Barbara and Jimmy so well that I know exactly what they would and wouldn’t say. My editor on Death Will Extend Your Vacation edited the manuscript very lightly, bless her, but she tried to add “ed” every time Bruce said or thought “damn,” as in “a damn fine wake.” She made him sound like a Regency buck. I had to tell her he wouldn’t say “a damned fine wake” in a million years. And neither would I. Diego, on the other hand, came out of nowhere, but he sounds like exactly who he is, a young man at the end of the 15th century who’s had to deal with the shattering of his whole world but at the same time is having the adventure of a lifetime. I suppose a lifetime of reading historical novels gave me the raw material for an authentic historical voice.
Where is your favorite place to write?
I write at my desktop computer in my apartment. Or if I’m in the country, I have a laptop positioned so I look out at the birds and flowers. I need solitude and quiet to write. I can’t fathom how people who write in Starbucks do it.
When is your favorite time of day to write?
I do my best work in the morning, when I’m fresh. Occasionally, if I’m on so much of a roll that I want to continue through the afternoon, I’ll take a nap if I feel the slightest bit drowsy and then go back to the keyboard.
Describe your writing space.
There’s a bobble-head Poe (father of the detective story and patron saint of my group blog, Poe’s Deadly Daughters) on the desk by the computer and a black rubber bat (the winged kind) hanging from my desk lamp for inspiration. My back is to the window, so the light is behind me, and when I raise my eyes, I see a painting of my mother and a big calendar photo of my granddaughters on the facing wall.
Where do you go to do some writing when you want to escape from your usual surroundings?
If I’m tired of the city, I go to the country and write on my laptop there, but since I usually have either place to myself, I never want to write anywhere else. (My husband has a day job and is a real city boy who’d never go out to the Hamptons if I didn’t insist once in a while. I did a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida in 2006. That was three weeks with a wonderful “room of my own” to write in plus a community of other writers, and I got a lot done. But I really don’t want or need to escape my usual surroundings to have terrific writing conditions. I’m lucky.
What are the five most distracting things when you’re working?
The phone. I hate the phone.
Email. I like to clear new email the moment it comes in. When I’m working on a first draft, I try to start the day’s writing without checking my email first, but it’s really hard.
You’re not gonna believe this, but my upstairs neighbor bought her little boy a drum kit for Xmas. He’s two years old.
Getting drowsy. Sometimes the living room couch starts calling to me. I do love naps, but they can eat up writing time.
My husband wanting to be sociable. Luckily, he understands “GO AWAY!”
Tell us your favorite joke.
Here’s my favorite clean limerick:
A gentleman dining in Kew
Found quite a large mouse in his stew.
Said the waiter, “Don’t shout
Or wave it about
Or the rest will be wanting one too.”
When's the last time you used profanity?
Probably this morning. Hey, I’m a New Yorker.
What are your top three pet peeves?
Cellphonistas. If I ever kill someone, it’ll probably be some dits gabbing about her love life on the phone at the top of her lungs while her toddler tries in vain to get her attention, or maybe one crossing the street (and I live in Manhattan, we’re talking big streets full of traffic) while texting and paying no attention to her surroundings. Or a guy going on and on in a booming voice about investments or sports or the latest high tech toy while you’re on line at the post office and can’t escape. Has anybody noticed that it’s always the one in the public place with the cell phone who’s doing all the talking, never the person on the other end of the line? I guess all three of my top pet peeves are cellphonistas.
What’s the oddest thing you’ve ever done to promote your work?
I can tell you the most embarrassing thing, and it’s probably the oddest considering that my natural audience for Death Will Get You Sober, Death Will Help You Leave Him, and Death Will Extend Your Vacation would be people in recovery. I was at ALA, the American Library Association convention, in Philadelphia with a bunch of people from the New York chapter of MWA. We had a booth, and Rosemary Harris had the bright idea of serving Bloody Marys (very appropriate for mystery writers) while we signed our books. I had the tray in my hand—and it wasn’t the tray of Virgin Marys—when two guys who happened to be in AA came up to me. I couldn’t backpedal fast enough, handing off my tray to the nearest person and begging them to take free copies of Death Will Get You Sober, because I was sure they’d love it.
What’s the strangest fan question/request you’ve ever gotten? (And, did you comply?)
This is supposed to be strange, and the fan was very apologetic, but I not only complied, I was thrilled: I was in the ladies room at Malice when she asked me very hesitantly if I’d mind signing her copy of my book, because she’d been trying to catch up with me all weekend and had a train to catch. It’s such a fan no-no that I don’t know if I convinced her I really didn’t mind—but if you go to the gallery on my website, you’ll see the photo I insisted on having someone snap.
What’s your favorite mystery movie?
Not sure I have one.
What do you most dislike about promoting your work?
Paying for it.
How have readers received your books
Those who love them really love them, and that includes people in recovery as well as some for whom it’s a totally unfamiliar world. I think those who don’t bring their own feelings about alcoholism to them, or the characters don’t click with them.
– Do you hear from them, --
Yes. Not in huge numbers, but enough to be gratifying.
– Are there have any good/funny/touching experiences happened with regard to readers?
My favorite happened in the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Arizona at a talk and signing. I had appeared on Good Morning Arizona that morning, talking about Death Will Get You Sober. Only a few people showed up, but Barbara Peters insisted we put the chairs in a circle and I give my spiel. I was just winding down when I guy walked into the bookstore, saw the circle of chairs, sat down, and said, “Hi, I’m Bob, I’m an alcoholic.”
Whatever I’d said in my four-minute TV spot had made him feel safe enough to feel at home.
– What kind of fan mail do you get?
A trickle of appreciative emails. Nothing bizarre or negative from fans.
– What do your fans most like about your books?
The characters, the dialogue, the voice, the authenticity of what I have to say about recovery. What I love best about what the fans like is when they say I made them both laugh and cry. That’s exactly what I dreamed of doing.
What's a common and accepted practice for Americans nowadays that you think we'll look back on with regret?
Making college kids go into debt if they want financial aid.
How often do you Google yourself?
Very infrequently
If you had to move into a shared apartment, which two fictional characters (yours, someone else’s, or characters from movies or TV) would you choose as roommates and why?
Judge Deborah Knott and Sharon McCone. I think I’d enjoy their company, and they both appreciate the value of women friends.
Respond to these pairings and tell why you respond the way you do:
a. Series or stand-alone books
Series—as a reader, I adore my favorite series and reread them frequently
b. Lots of research or make it all up
Make it all up—I love to be accurate, but I don’t like doing the research
c. Neat or sloppy
Neat—but I think my husband would laugh if he knew I said so
d. NY or DC
NY, of course
e. Carnivore or Vegetarian
Carnivore
f. Caffeine or Decaffeinated
Depends on the time of day
If you could invite any five historical figures to dinner (all together or one at a time) who would they be? And why?
Louisa May Alcott, Emma Goldman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Fuller, Amelia Earhart
If you had to cast your novel as a movie, who would you get to play your characters and why?
Casting Bruce, Barbara, and Jimmy in my series for a movie: Still thinking about it.
How do you like your steak?
Medium rare if the chef is American, medium if he’s French
What is your favorite TV show (old or new)?
West Wing
What did you have for breakfast?
granola with blueberries
How do you dress when you write?
a very comfortable ankle-length T-shirt (I have several)
Are you a morning person or a night person?
morning
Favorite Flower?
peony
Favorite ice cream?
peppermint stick
If you could max out your credit card, in what establishment would you do that?
One of the online travel agencies where you can get airline flights and hotels
How many tattoos do you have?
None
If you decided to get a piercing, what type would it be?
My ears—but since I didn’t do it when I was 15, and I’ve spent the last half a century or so collecting clip and screwback earrings, it’s not gonna happen
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