Author: Margaret Lucke

Of Carrots and Sticks — and Cake

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Margaret Lucke and her books

By Margaret Lucke

I’ve been staring at the blank page on my computer screen for what seems like hours when my Muse finally slouches into my office. She plops herself onto the soft chair in the corner. “Here I am,” she says. “Where’s my reward?”

“Reward!” I turn from the computer to face her. “What are you talking about? You just arrived. You haven’t given me anything yet. Not the first word of a sentence. Not even the glimmer of an idea. You don’t get a reward just for showing up.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Pay for work that hasn’t happened? What kind of business model is that?”

“Ooh, I didn’t know what we do is a business.” She gets up, walks across the room, and peers at the screen. “Where’s the profit-and-loss statement? Are we making money? What’s my cut?”

“Never mind. We need to get busy on chapter 18.” I position my fingers on the keyboard, ready to type something brilliant. “When we left off, Jocelyn was waiting for Luke to show up in the empty house. She doesn’t know he’s the one who killed Gretchen. How shall we open the scene?”

My Muse crosses her arms over her chest. “I’m still waiting for my reward.”

“Later,” I say firmly. “We don’t get rewards until we’ve accomplished something.”

“What’s that then?” She points to my tea mug.

“Fuel.” I pick up the mug and take a big swig.

“Uh-huh. And this? Looks like a reward to me.”

Next to the mug is a plate with a tiny morsel (it’s a very small piece, honest) of dessert left over from last night.

“My breakfast,” I explain as I take a delicious bite. “Carrot cake.”

“Ah … carrot.” She nods knowingly. “The proverbial donkey’s reward. The farmer gives the donkey a carrot, and the donkey takes the farmer to the market. A fair arrangement, but you can see that the reward comes first.”

“No, no. The farmer dangles the carrot in front of the donkey. The donkey moves toward it, but the carrot stays just out of reach until they reach their destination. Only then does the donkey get its reward.”

“Can I have some of your cake?” she asks, just as I pop the last tidbit into my mouth.

I lift my hands in a gesture of apology. “Sorry.”

She rolls her eyes. “Poor donkey. It must feel as frustrated as I do.”

“Remember, the farmer also carries a stick, so he can swat the donkey’s behind if it doesn’t cooperate. The carrot is a positive motivator and the stick is a negative motivator. The idea is—”

“Motivate, schmotivate. If I were the donkey, I’d tell that farmer where to stick his carrot.”

She goes back to the soft chair to pout.

“Come on now,” I say. She doesn’t move.

I wheedle. I cajole. No response. I look around for something to use as a stick.

But I know that won’t work. Instead, I take the plate to the kitchen and refill it, this time with two slices of cake. I return to my office and set the plate beside the computer.

“Pull up your chair,” I say to my Muse. “The big piece is yours.”

She smiles as she scooches her chair forward and picks up the extra fork I brought. “Speaking of sticks, did you know Luke is bringing his hockey stick to the house with him? To use as a weapon against Jocelyn. No, wait, not a stick, a knife. That way he can hide it under his coat. Mmm, yummy cake!”

“Hey, he can’t kill Jocelyn. We need her for the rest of the story.”

“Don’t worry, she’ll save herself. A little more of this reward and I’ll figure out how. Make sure the next piece has plenty of frosting!”

The Great Grammar Experiment

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By Margaret Lucke

It’s September (already!), and as I watch the neighborhood kids head back to school I find myself thinking about the lessons I learned early on that led to my becoming a writer. Specifically, grammar lessons.

Writers love words—their sound, their rhythm, their layers of straightforward and subtle meanings.  Words are our paint and brushes. We use them not just to tell stories, but to give our ideas color, shape, substance, and texture. Words are the magic wands we wave to bring characters to life, to set a plot into motion.

We adore words.

But grammar? Not so much.

The problem is that people tend to think of grammar as rules that seem arbitrary and arcane terms that they can’t remember. Participle, subjunctive case, subordinate clause—arrgh! Who cares?

Do I reveal myself as a hopeless nerd if I confess that I find grammar fun? No, I can’t define subjunctive case without looking it up. But that’s not the point. Grammar isn’t really about rules and labels. It’s the anatomy of the language, the essential connective tissue that binds our wonderful words into coherent and meaningful patterns. Without grammar, what we write makes no sense.

One of the most useful things I learned in school was how to diagram a sentence. Seriously! It was like I’d finally cracked a code. Gertrude Stein probably was exaggerating when she said, “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences,” but not by much.

When I tell people this, they laugh at me or groan. Or else they look at me blankly, especially the young ones. Apparently this valuable skill isn’t taught much in English classes these days.

I haven’t actually diagrammed a sentence in years, but I’m glad I learned how. It made me understand of how the parts of a sentence fit together—how the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone. It taught me where to put the commas, how to keep my modifiers from dangling, and how to arrange my words so that a sentence means what I intend it to.

Other than that one lesson, formal grammar instruction is pretty useless. I have scientific proof. In ninth grade I was part of the Great Grammar Experiment.

My school district developed, at great expense, a language skills curriculum using a fancy instructional methodology called programmed learning. The theory, based on the experiments of the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, was that presenting the material in lessons with small, sequential steps and rewarding correct responses quickly would reinforce the mastery of the material.

For the pilot test, two English classes at my school were selected to be the guinea pigs. For twenty minutes every day, kids in the first class trudged through the special set of grammar drills.

The second class was the control group. Its students weren’t taught grammar at all. Instead they read lots of stories and essays and turned in weekly writing assignments.

In September, January, and June, both classes took standardized tests that measured their ability to use grammar correctly. You can guess the result:  To the dismay of school officials, all of that drilling made no discernible difference for the hapless class upon which it had been inflicted. But the readers and writers had developed a strong sense of how language works. Their scores improved by leaps and bounds.

The expensive program was scrapped.

I’m grateful to this day that I was in the second class.

Les vacances et l’ecriture*

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* Vacations and Writing
by Margaret Lucke

“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer,
life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.”
–Eugene Ionescu

Ionesco may be right. Even when writers take time off, our brains keep chugging away on the story. Plot details pop into mind at odd moments. Characters whisper secrets in our ear. No matter what we’re doing, the story is humming in the background.

So, yes, we’re always writing. But that doesn’t mean we have to stay chained to our desks. Sometimes a change of pace in a fresh environment—in other words, a vacation—is exactly what our creativity needs.

A writers group I belonged to for many years used to have a wonderful tradition. Each autumn, we held our own writers retreat. We rented a pair of cottages in the nearby seaside town of Stinson Beach and spent a week there writing. No phones. No TV. No families. No errands to run. Just our stories and the companionship of other writers. We each had our own room to work in and a long beach to walk on. Fresh air. The sounds of the wind and the gulls. Everyone brought her own food for breakfast and lunch. In the evenings we took turns making dinner and gathered by the fireplace for wine and conversation. We went home with our spirits rejuvenated and lots of work accomplished.

Then our horizons expanded. One of our members, Joan, was offered the opportunity to spend September and October of that year in a grand maison in a medieval hilltop village in Provence. The cost was extremely reasonable, and the house would accommodate a large number of guests. Why not, she suggested, hold our annual retreat there?

So off we went to Venasque, which is to be considered one of the most beautiful of Provençal villages. It sits east of Avignon in the midst of vineyards and lavender fields, near the slopes of Mont Ventoux, the southernmost peak of the Alps. Its church was built in 1100s, next to a baptistery that dates all the way back to the 6th century. It is said that the baptistery was built on the site of a temple to Venus, the goddess of love who is still honored in the village’s name.

Not all of our writing group members could stay for the full two months but each of us got there for at least a few days, as did some of Joan’s other friends. I spent all of October in France, one of the most memorable months of my life.

The days quickly settled into an agreeable rhythm. Churchbells woke me at seven. I’d read in bed or write at the table in my pretty blue bedroom until nine. That gave me time for breakfast before the daily tour began at ten. Several of us would take off in our leased car to visit a museum or a monastery, or explore a Roman ruin or another medieval town, or stroll through a picturesque outdoor market. We’d stop at a patisserie with an outdoor terrace for a café crème and a pain au chocolat, then head home for dinner and a glass or two of the local wine. Around nine we’d start drifting to our rooms, some to sleep, others like me to write for a couple of hours.

We were enthusiastic tourists, yet we got a lot of work done. There was no computer, no phone, no TV, no billboards along the roads, no job to go to—just as at Stinson Beach, we had none of the constant distractions and demands for attention that we experienced in our normal lives. And there were plenty of new sights, sounds, and scents to stimulate both our senses and our mental story engines. Going home was hard, yet the positive effects of the trip lasted for a long time. I still get a boost just from the memories.

France was a hard act to follow, and that trip proved to be the writing group’s last retreat. The next year, and again the one after, we couldn’t find a week when we were all free to go to Stinson Beach, and sadly the tradition died.

Right now, as the summer vacation season wraps up, I’m feeling the stirrings of writer’s wanderlust. Surely a sojourn like my adventures in Stinson Beach and the south of France would help me move forward with my current novel-in-progress. If the power of positive thinking really works, I’ll soon find a good way to combine les vacances et l’ecriture—vacation and writing—no matter what Ionescu says.

The painting of Venasque is by artist Lawrence Yamamoto, a member of our group. 

* * *

This fall I will be teaching a course called The Craft of Writing for UC Berkeley’s Extension program. Ten Thursday evenings, September 10 through November 12, 6–9 pm Pacific time. If you are interested in learning more, you can find out by clicking here.

Summertime–and the Reading Was Easy

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Banner showing author Margaret Lucke and some of her books

by Margaret Lucke

When I think about summer, I remember my parents’ screened porch.

The house I grew up in had a large square porch, with a sturdy roof to shade us from the sun and three walls made of mesh screening to let in the breeze and keep out the mosquitoes. I lived on that porch in the summertime.

Lemonade and books

A chaise lounge angled out from one corner, offering a view of the holly tree in the backyard and the umbrella table on the patio. It was a heavy piece of furniture, crafted from redwood, with a thick, dark green cushion for sprawling on. Next to it was a table just the right size for a tall icy glass of lemonade and a book or two.

Nowadays my summers are much like any other season. Sure, daylight lasts longer and temperatures are hotter, but the patterns and rhythms of my routine are much the same in the summer as the rest of the year. But when I was a kid summer was different. Summer was magic. Summer was freedom, and an endless opportunity to do what I wanted to do.

And what I wanted to do was read.

I did plenty of other things too, of course. My summer memories include swimming and biking and going on family vacations and playing hide-and-go-seek and hanging out with my friends. But I reveled in having lots of time to read, and to read anything I chose, just for fun, no homework assignments or book reports required.

I spent long hours on that porch, reading. Depending on what book I was immersed in, the chaise lounge became my pirate ship, my covered wagon, my police car, my rocket to the moon. I’m sure other people – my parents, my sisters – spent time on the porch too, but I thought of it as my private domain.

 When I was eight I read my way through the Bobbsey Twins. About that same time I discovered the wonderful Childhood of Famous Americans series. Unlike most biographies, these concentrated on what a person of accomplishment was like as a kid, someone I could relate to. The books had bright orange covers and were illustrated with silhouette drawings, and I loved them. I still have half a dozen in my personal library. (The series still exists, but with different packaging, and it’s just not the same. Buy the old ones used for some child you love.)

A year or two later I fell in love with mysteries. I started with Trixie Belden, Ginny Gordon, and Nancy Drew, then graduated to my mother’s shelves of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen. I dabbled in science fiction and Westerns and an occasional romance. I read The Secret Garden more than once, and I loved books like Little Women and Black Beauty and Caddie Woodlawn and The Witch of Blackbird Pond. But I always came back to mysteries.

When I was twelve I put kids’ books aside in favor of Gone with the Wind, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Marjorie Morningstar. My mystery reading branched out to include the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers, Rex Stout, Ross Macdonald, and John D. MacDonald.

As much as the books themselves, what I loved was having long stretches of interrupted time to read. That’s a luxury now. On average I manage to read three books a month, one every ten days. In the Julys and Augusts of my childhood, stretched out the green cushion on the screened porch, I might polish off five or six times that many.

How about you? What are some of the books and reading experiences you remember fondly from when you were a kid?

Hacked!

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 4 Comments
Banner showing author Margaret Lucke and some of her books

By Margaret Lucke

Connections with friends and family, facts at your fingertips, movies, puzzles, games (I’m looking at you, New York Times Spelling Bee). The internet, email, and other forms of modern technology have many benefits to offer. Maybe even AI does, though the jury is still out on that one, if you ask me.

But there are downsides too, and I experienced one of those the other day when my professional author email address got hacked.

The first hint of the disaster came a week ago Friday in the form of a phone call from a friend—I’ll call her Grace—who is on the mailing list for my newsletter. She said, “I got an email from you about needing money from a workshop. I responded to it saying I’d be happy to contribute, but the next message asked me to send the money directly to ‘him’ via Venmo. The him made me suspicious, so I thought I’d check. Was this request really from you?”

 Well, it most certainly was not from me. I asked Grace to forward the email exchange to me, which she did.

Turned out the request for money was tacked onto a brief exchange of emails we had when she sent a compliment in response to my August 2024 email, using the pro address. The new (fake) message, sent on June 6, 2026, said: “Could you please email me back when you receive this.” So she did, replying with a one-line message along the lines of “Sure, what’s up?”

That triggered a long, plaintive, tear-jerk of a message that said, in part: “I’m in a really tight spot with the Writers Workshop & Fundraiser I’ve been pouring my heart into” and “I wouldn’t reach out like this if it weren’t truly urgent. The full payment has to be made before Monday, or I risk losing the space and with it, months of preparation, energy, and resources I’ve already invested” and “If you’re able to support me in any way, it would mean more than I can express. This project is deeply personal to me, and I’m doing everything I can to keep it from slipping away at the last moment.”

None of which is true.

After my conversation with Grace, I started hearing from others who had received similar emails that purported to be from me. One friend reported that after she responded to the “Could you please email me back when you receive this” message, she received a request in my name that she support a political candidate whom she knows I oppose.

It was time to take action.

I tried to log into my pro email account, which is attached to my website. My password wouldn’t work. When I tried to change it, I was asked to enter an authentication code that I never received. So I initiated an online chat with the provider of my website and pro email address. I went around and around with an AI bot, which kept suggesting I try generic solutions, none of which helped. Finally I convinced the bot that I needed to deal with a real human being. With that person’s help I was able to set a new password and new two-factor authentication.

Hopefully the problem is now resolved. What I’ve lost is a lot of time, all of the emails that were in my now-empty inbox and sent file, and perhaps some goodwill.

I sent out an emergency email to my newsletter list, just in case, warning my subscribers about the hack. But for the newsletter I use a mailing service. Those individuals’ addresses weren’t in my pro email records except for the few who had gotten in touch with me that way.  

One little suspicious thing: I had spent the previous Sunday at the Bay Area Book Festival, signing and schmoozing at the Bay Area Romance Writers booth. I pleased to collect three new subscribers for my newsletter and I had pleasant chats with everyone who signed up. Later, when I sent them my standard welcome email, I included a new tagline that I hadn’t used before. Interestingly, that tagline was used on the spam emails sent in my name. I’m not quite sure what to make of that.

The whole experience has left me shaken. And frustrated. And angry. And confused.

So if anyone reading this post receives an email from me that makes a plea for money or asks you to support a politician—or even one that just says: “Could you please email me back when you receive this”—please let me know it happened so I can figure out the next steps I need to take. Your next step is to not respond and put it in your trash or your junk/spam folder. And please be cautious. The scamsters are out there and they want your funds badly enough to steal them.