Author: Margaret Lucke

Summertime–and the Reading Was Easy

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 8 Comments
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.  

Author, Entrepreneur, Wearer of Hats

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 6 Comments

By Margaret Lucke

Recently I came across a quote I wrote down several years ago when I attended an event at my local public library. The speaker was mystery author Stella Baker, who talked about her adventures in writing and publishing her debut novel 4 Gigs of Trouble. I was particularly struck by one comment she made, so I scribbled it down:

“A book begins as an act of creativity, is finished by an act of will, and once published is a business.”

How true, I thought. But then it occurred to me that maybe this statement doesn’t go far enough. Because in reality, most writers I know who succeed in reaching readers and earning money in this crazy profession treat it like a business from start to finish. That’s especially true these days, when the publishing industry is going through a transformation and no one is certain how all of the changes will sort out. It can pay off for authors to think of themselves as entrepreneurs.

Some years ago, when my husband and I owned a printing business, we enrolled in a series of small business workshops. They were organized into three topics – the three basic functions of any business:

1. Production – manufacturing the product, or providing the service.

2. Marketing – finding customers and persuading them to buy.

3. Administration – doing all of the tasks of running the business and enabling the first two functions to happen, including managing the finances.

In other words, a business needs someone to make it, someone to sell it, and someone to count the money.

Once upon a time, a writer’s business model looked like this. The writer concentrated the most important part of the production–writing the book. Then she engaged a representative (the literary agent) to secure a partner (the publisher) for the enterprise. The partner would handle the rest of the production tasks, like editing, design, typesetting, creation of a cover, and printing, as well as the administrative the administrative aspects of their work. And, oh yes, everything involved with marketing. In fact, a friend of mine whose publishing credits go back to the 1970s has told me that her early contracts with publishers expressly forbade her from doing any marketing for her books.

All the writer had to do was write – and, with any luck, count some money.

How times have changed!

Gradually publishers pushed more and more tasks onto the writer’s shoulders. Skip the typesetting; we’ll use the author’s electronic files. Skip the marketing, except at the most basic level; if the writer wants to have the book promoted, she can do it herself.

Many writers still prefer to pursue the traditional writer-publisher partnership. But now, with the rise of independent publishers, more and more authors have decided that the partnership is no longer working to their advantage. So they’re skipping the partnership with a publisher and taking charge of the entire enterprise of placing a book into a reader’s hands. I’ve formed my own mini-publishing company to help me do just that, for myself and a handful of writer friends.

With the industry in flux, none of us knows what its future business model will look like. I’m reminded of a headline I saw a couple of years ago, when Penguin Random was facing an antitrust lawsuit stemming from its ultimately unsuccessful attempt to acquire Simon & Schuster: “Big publishers spend three weeks in court trying to prove that they have no idea what they’re doing.”

Last month, the Northern California chapter of Sisters in Crime sponsored a talk at Oakland’s main library by publishing guru Jane Friedman. Her message: The author has become the protagonist in the publishing industry’s story. The percentage of sales that goes to the big publishers’ books is slipping, while small and independent publishers are rising in terms of sales and clout. The publishers can’t do it without us.

But whatever our route to publication, succeeding in the writing business will involve wearing a lot of different hats. Not only that, it will mean balancing them all on our heads without letting any fall off. We’re more than writers; we’re producers, marketers, administrators, tellers of stories, suppliers of entertainment and inspiration to the world.

In other words, we’re entrepreneurs. Whether we like it or not. Even though what most of us want to do is simply to write.

In Search of a Writing Routine

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

By Margaret Lucke

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” — E. B. White

The other day a nonwriter friend asked me if I write every day. With regret and some embarrassment I had to admit that despite my desires and good intentions, days (okay, weeks) often slip by without my having written a word. I mean, sure, I jot down grocery lists and dash off responses to emails, but that’s not my friend meant. She was referring to making progress on my current novel.

It’s not hard to come up with reasons not to write. Important and meaningful reasons. Errands need to be run, laundry must be done, good friends deserve a visit, the genius level on the New York Times Spelling Bee game insists on being achieved. But something feels off when I reach bedtime and realize that my protagonist has done nothing all day except sit there and twiddle her thumbs

I do believe in the value of writing routines. I’m convinced that having a good routine ensures a writer will be more productive, more focused, more intelligent, more witty and clever, more successful …

If only I could come up with one.

It’s not that I haven’t tried. In fact I’ve made quite a study of what works for others in the hope that I’d find a routine suited to my habits and temperament. What I’ve discovered is that routines are as varied as writers themselves, though they tend to fall into several categories.

>> The up-before-dawn writer

“Do they know I get up at five o’clock every morning to write 1,000 words before breakfast?” — Margaret Meade

These are the people who set the alarm for 4 or 5 a.m., get up and write for two or three hours, and then go off to report to their day jobs or whatever else places demands on their time. Anthony Trollope, who worked as a civil servant, wrote 46 novels this way. I have several friends who swear by this method and write fine books in the tender hours before sunrise.

>> The grab-bits-and-pieces-of-time writer

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.” — John Irving

Another friend, before she retired, spent all of her lunch hours at work in the parking lot, where she would sit in her car and write. Mystery writer and attorney Michael Gilbert wrote 23 novels on the train as he commuted from his home in Kent to his law firm’s London office. William Carlos Williams, a physician, scribbled stories and poems on prescription pads in between patients. I admire the way writers who do this can shift gears so quickly from other activities and home in on their writing.

>> The quota-system writer

“All through my career I’ve written 1,000 words a day — even if I’ve got a hangover.” — J.G. Ballard

These are the writers who set a daily goal and refuse to leave their desk until it is accomplished. The goal might be to write for a set number of hours or to achieve a specific page count or word count. This was the principal behind the sadly demised Nanowrimo, or National Novel Writing Month, which challenged writers each year in November to a produce a novel of at least 50,000 words. Producing 1,667 words a day would get you there. Note that the folks behind Nanowrimo didn’t insist that the novel be any good.

>> The ritual writer

“I had a ritual once of lighting a candle and writing by its light and blowing it out when I was done for the night.” — Jack Kerouac

Writers are not necessarily superstitious, but we know that sometimes we must do certain things to draw the muse to our side and appease her when she’s present. This can lead to some peculiar writing routines. Victor Hugo would shed his clothes and instruct his valet to hide them; being nude, he couldn’t leave the house so he might as well write. Charles Dickens carefully arranged certain items on his desk to foster his creativity, among them a vase of fresh flowers and a bronze statuette of dueling toads. Natalie Goldberg often wrote with a cigarette in her mouth; she usually didn’t smoke it but used it as “a prop to help me dream into another world.”

I’ve dabbled in variations from each of these categories, but I haven’t found the perfect routine for me. How about you? What works? I’m open to your suggestions.

Self-Discipline at 5 in the Morning

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 3 Comments

By Margaret Lucke

How do you define self-discipline? To me, it’s the quality that enables you to force yourself to do something you know is good for you when you’d rather do something else.

It’s focusing on business rather than pleasure.

It’s favoring long-term goals (lose five pounds, meet the deadline) over short-term benefits (eat the chocolate, spend the gorgeous afternoon taking a walk).

It’s getting up way too early in the morning, when any normal person would still be tucked up comfortably in bed.

But not everyone agrees with me.

Quite a few years ago, as an aspiring mystery novelist, I attended the late, great Cabrillo Suspense Writers Conference, a wonderful event held annually for a decade at a rustic lodge in the Santa Cruz Mountains. One day I had a conversation over coffee with a fellow writer. At that time he had published two well-received mystery novels, but he was still working long hours at his day job at a local college. Finding time to write was a challenge for me, and I asked him how he managed to do that while dealing all of the other demands in his life.

“It’s simple,” he explained. “Every morning, seven days a week, I get up at 5 o’clock and sit down at his desk to write.”

Seriously? There’s a 5 o’clock in the morning? I thought 5 o’clock automatically meant late afternoon.

I am not a morning person. I’m fine with being awake when it’s dark outside, but only if I’ve approached it from the other end, the gradual fading of daylight into night. But wake up while it’s still dark? Impossible. Until daylight touches my bedroom window, my eyes refuse to open and my brain is on strike. I can’t find the floor at 5 a.m. unless I fall out of bed. There’s no way I can write a coherent sentence.

But I have a high regard for writers, and I’ve known several, who regularly rise before dawn to produce pages. Good pages too, not the gibberish I’d come up with.

I said as much to my coffee companion: “You know, I really admire your self-discipline.”

His response surprised me. “Oh, that’s not self-discipline.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “You just said you make yourself get up every morning when you want to be sleeping and force yourself to sit and write.”

“That’s right.”

“How is that not self-discipline? It sounds like the perfect example to me.”

He took a sip of his coffee. “It’s not self-discipline because I don’t enjoy it.”

What? To me, if he didn’t enjoy it, then his peculiar (to me) habit fit the definition even more. Obviously we had different takes on what self-discipline means. I prodded, but I couldn’t get him to explain his concept any further.

Self-discipline or not, whatever he was doing worked. He went on to considerable success and acclaim as a mystery writer, with almost three dozen novels to his credit and several awards on his shelf. My track record, on the other hand, is considerably shorter.

Maybe I should try setting my alarm clock just a little bit earlier.