Unanswered Questions

by LAUREL CORONA

As past readers know, I have been in a transition period in my personal life, which has extended quite naturally into my life as a writer. I began my last SDWW post like this:

“I can’t write about writing or the writing life today, because I am not doing any of the former, and as to the latter, I don’t have one.”

I still haven’t opened the file on either my novel being marketed presently, or the one I had just finished drafting when my husband, Jim, was showing signs that the end of his life was near. Now, they both seem like a dream from a different world, and it’s fortunate that neither demands my attention.

I suppose once you’re published you are permanently an author, but I don’t want to picture myself in the future telling someone that I used to write. I do self-identify as an author, and it has been a bit concerning to me how my interest in writing vanished overnight.

I don’t kick myself about it. I just have questions about that aspect of my life. Of course I do. I have questions about every aspect of my life as I refashion myself in my new reality.

Writers constantly engage in self-questioning even when they are at their most productive, and I think that this ongoing questioning may play a big role in keeping us motivated.

I don’t mean the big question that plagues novice writers: Can I do this? Or, to give it a little more bite, can I do this without embarrassing myself? Can I do this well enough to get published? How about to make a living at it? Writers have many of those kinds of questions starting out.

I think I speak for most of my author friends when I say that we don’t go there anymore. Though the blank page, or computer screen, is just as formidable an obstacle the tenth time as the first, the question of whether we will be able to come up with a finished, marketable product has already been answered in the affirmative, in some cases many times over.

I had an artist friend in graduate school who painted the most exquisite watercolor landscapes. She told me that painters look at a new work as a problem they want to solve. Rembrandt might have wanted to work on how shadows fell across a nose; Ingres might have wanted to work on that subtle area just under the eyes, which I have been told is one of the most difficult challenges of portrait painting.

As writers gain experience, we move from the question of whether we can do it in a general sense, to whether we can meet more specific challenges. I knew my time to write Young Adult library books was at an end not because I didn’t like learning the things I wrote about, or couldn’t use the money, but because there were no questions left about me as a writer in that kind of work.

Historical fiction opened up a phalanx of new worries. Can I write vivid descriptions of places? Can I differentiate characters by mannerisms and speech? Can I sustain a plot over 350-400 pages? Can I write a death scene? A sex scene? A battle scene? Can I write from the point of view of a child? Can I condense time effectively? Can I foreshadow?

Those questions, and others, are answered now. As a result, the challenge now lies in part in keeping myself engaged about continuing to write novels now that I know I can do it.

So as I relax into my new life, I can’t predict where my writing will go. I can’t say, though, as I did in my last post that I don’t have a writing life. I do. It just hasn’t quite shown me yet what it will be.

On a Personal Note, About LOST GIRLS

By Caitlin Rother

When I set out to write LOST GIRLS, I tried to assure John Gardner's mother, Cathy Osborn, that she would stop being the target of blame once the book was released. I would be the one to take the hits. And as most people in San Diego who watched or read the news have witnessed over the past month, I was right.

I don't need to feel validated by being right, especially in this context. I just want to say that my determination to hold my course was fueled by my deep-seated belief that no matter what the blowback, I would not stray from my journalistic ideals, because I truly believed that my research and writing could foster much needed change.

Today, after a month that started out with personal and professional attacks and also resulted in a tremendous outpouring of support and encouragement from fellow authors, former newspaper colleagues and total strangers, I don't regret for a moment my decision to write LOST GIRLS, the story behind the rape and murder of San Diego area teens Chelsea King and Amber Dubois by sexual predator John Gardner.

I will say it again. I am sorry for the loss of Chelsea's and Amber's parents and I am sorry that they feel “deeply hurt” by this book, because that was not my intention. My intention was to honor their daughters' memory by working to prevent future victims from falling to the same fate.

Despite being described by some critics as greedy, repulsive, disgusting, and insensitive, I am choosing to focus on the polar opposite comments from supporters who described me as calm, rational, gracious and compassionate throughout these past weeks, not to mention in the sensitive way I wrote the book. I'm especially grateful for the positive and supportive e-mails and reviews from law-enforcement sources, defense attorneys, prosecutors and government officials, expressing their appreciation and hope that the book will open some eyes.

Here’s the bottom line: If it took me being a target of anger and controversy for people to read LOST GIRLS, absorb and process the red flags in Gardner's life as well as the multiple flaws in the system that allowed him to roam free and kill these two girls, then so be it. As a society, let's now take advantage of this anger and direct it toward fostering change and furthering public education to spark new legislation, changes in regulations or at the very least to create a new awareness of what genetic and environmental factors can produce sexual predators like Gardner. Let's do further study of the systemic holes I’ve identified so we can put some protections in place to protect ourselves – and the predators from themselves, once they go into freefall.

In the end, I feel that the blowback has been worth the personal toll it took, that my goal of trying to spur lively debate has been met and for that I am grateful. I can only hope that people will stay fired up enough to keep the momentum going so we may find some answers to these difficult problems.

For me, this is my most important book to date and that's why I put so much time and effort into telling the story right, proactively addressing the needs of all the families involved, both Gardner’s and the victims’ – because I knew this content would be so personal and so potentially inflammatory.

I'd like to add a couple of personal notes for the record: One, I am no stranger to tragedy or media scrutiny into my personal life, and perhaps that’s partly why I'm so drawn to this genre. And two, I am not a mother, a point that a few critics jumped on to accuse me of ignoring how the victim's parents would feel about the book. That said, I always wanted to have children, one if not two, and I married a man at 33 with that very purpose in mind.

My husband, who was at one time a public figure -- the chief investment officer of the San Diego County pension fund -- fell from grace and was written up in the newspaper more than once. He was an alcoholic who was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, the same disorder as Wayne Adam Ford, the other serial rapist killer I wrote about in my book BODY PARTS.  While my husband was the CIO and I was a reporter at The San Diego Union-Tribune, he was arrested for stealing items from the gift shop at the Phoenician resort in Arizona, where he was attending a professional conference.

I learned after his death in April 1999 – from the police report that he hid from me – that he'd been in an alcoholic blackout at the time of his arrest. He was not only an alcoholic but a compulsive spender of his personal money. But he was so ashamed of being a man broken by his addiction that he chose to let the public – and the beneficiaries of the San Diego County Employees Retirement Association – believe that he was a thief so he didn’t have to reveal his flaws during the civil service commission public hearing process. That decision cost him the job he loved so much, and perpetuated a downward spiral that ultimately took his life. 

After being sober for a year and two 911 calls I’d made – once to report him as a 5150 (deeming him a danger to himself or others) for making suicidal threats and once after he picked up a bat when I tried to take away his vodka bottle – he relapsed one too many times. I told him our marriage was over, and he committed suicide several days after our last phone call, during which I asked if he felt as though he were going to hurt himself and he said no. He was severely depressed; he couldn't live with alcohol and he couldn't live without it. 

And there, for the record, went my dream of having children. It was just too late and I decided it would be too selfish to have one on my own.  When I spoke of his alcoholism and depression in his obituary, I received e-mails thanking me for helping to remove the stigma. I feel the same way now, as if I'm navigating some of the same waters by writing this book and dealing with all the questions about my integrity and motivations.

Maybe now people will better understand why I really write these books, that I personally do understand tragedy, and how I can and do empathize with the victims and their families. If I were trying to make money, believe me, I would've gone into a different field. But I think I'm right where I belong, doing what I love, because the work is so rewarding.

I hope some of you can join me for my last scheduled book talk/signing for the summer, tomorrow, Saturday, July 21 at 3 pm at the Rancho San Diego library in El Cajon.

New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother, a Pulitzer-nominee who worked as an investigative reporter for nearly 20 years, has written or co-authored eight books: Poisoned Love, Deadly Devotion/Where Hope Begins, My Life, Deleted, Body Parts, Twisted Triangle, Naked Addiction, and Dead Reckoning. Her latest book is Lost Girls, about the murder of innocents Chelsea King and Amber Dubois by sexual predator John Gardner. For more information, please check her website, http://caitlinrother.com.

Wrestling the Black Bear: On Editing and the Editorial Letter

by Margaret Dilloway


A few weeks ago, my agent sent back a longish editorial letter for my new work in progress, which concerns a 12th century samurai woman and two half-Japanese contemporary women.

About a week before he read it, I had a new idea. I e-mailed him asking if I should include an additional samurai-era character. He said go for it, so I added her in.

This resulted in the longest manuscript I've ever written, with four points-of-view. Not only that, a good half of it is historical fiction, which I have never before attempted.

Yep, I jumped into rougher waters than usual, but I managed to swim. Barely, it felt like.

Thus, due to the historical and highly ambitious nature of the book (plus it is now 581 pages!) I was already extra anxious when I sent it to my agent (also, it'll be our first book together, so I really wanted him to love it).

When I received his editorial letter, my first reaction, as it always is when I get an editorial letter, was DESPAIR. I ignored all the good and nice things he said about it and looked at the rest and thought, 'Dear Lord! How am I ever going to do all this?' and stared at his comments for a couple of days.

Then, I actually read the letter more closely. Once my frazzled brain slept on it, I determined it wasn't a)entirely bad and b) how to break it down to do the work.

My husband says I panic too easily when faced with a letter like this. This is true. However, I think despair is definitely a stage you have to work through.

So I've composed some advice to my future self, when I get my next letter and have to wrestle the bear.

• Accept your despair/anxiety as normal.
• Let the thing marinate for a few days. Then reread it. It probably won't be as overwhelming.
• Think about whether or not you agree. Circle the items you agree with, or otherwise make an action plan.
• Consider doing a few different editing rounds. For example,  one editing round might be to just to add a single aspect, like setting, to each scene. Another editing round could be for dialogue or certain subplots.
• Check off the things on your master to-do list as you go through and make changes.
• Be open to the fact that the list might necessitate changes the editor didn't think of.

Another editing trick:
If you hate deleting your ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT scenes that are not necessary to the story, make another file titled CUT SCENES. Put your cut scenes in there. It will make you feel like you're not deleting them, plus you can use them again, or parts of them, if you need to.

Why I felt compelled to write LOST GIRLS

By Caitlin Rother

First I have a confession to make. After writing Body Parts, a book about serial rapist-killer Wayne Adam Ford, I really didn’t think I’d ever be able to stand getting into the head of another man like him, let alone one who had molested, raped and killed teenagers. I also have a standing rule: I cannot and will not write stories about young murdered children. I just can’t stomach it.

But on March 4, 2010, the day after John Gardner was arraigned for killing Chelsea King, and the same day he quietly told his attorneys he could lead them to Amber’s body (which remained a secret for six weeks), I got an e-mail from an editor from The Daily Beast, asking if I’d be interested in covering this case for them.

I said yes, and spent fourteen hours researching and writing the first article. The following week, I wrote a second one, which was difficult because District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis had issued a “gag order” e-mail, and the judge had also put an actual gag order in place. But, after watching my own community reeling from the emotional fallout of this case, I was feeling it too. I felt in my gut that I really wanted to tell this story – both sides of it, and very much in-depth.

For me to move forward and get past my own rule, I had to convince myself that Chelsea and Amber weren’t children, even though some folks might disagree. Still, because of their age and out of respect to their families, I knew I had to be extremely sensitive and thoughtful about how I wrote this book.

Following my usual methodology, I read every article and collected every piece of information I could, trying to determine if I could go further than the mainstream media. With the crazy amount of coverage, I was a bit worried at first. However, after a long series of calls and e-mails, I was able to persuade John Gardner’s family to open up to me. They were paid no money for telling me their story, they did it because they wanted it to be told accurately and in full detail, not in sound bites, and not taken out of context by the media. 

Knowing that I could tell the back story of how Gardner evolved into the man who could commit these heinous acts, I felt I could go deeper than any reporter had gone before me. And despite the dark subject matter, the investigative passion of revealing new facts energized me. I felt this book was more important than some of my earlier works because people are so scared of losing their children to sexual predators, and I felt we could all benefit from knowing why this happens. We, as a society, seem to have so little understanding of these men and how to deal with them. For some, I believe, it is just too repulsive and difficult a subject to ponder, but burying our heads in the sand won’t stop these crimes from occurring. For me, this was an opportunity to educate ALL of us.

The Gardner-Osborn family and I share a hope that this book will help educate people by delving into the factors that contributed to making John Gardner into a man who could not control his sexual and homicidal compulsions, and by casting a spotlight on the flawed system that allowed him and predators like him to roam free to prey on children, teenagers and grown women.

Although they’ve since become pessimistic that anything they say will help, I’m still hopeful that the idealism that drove me into journalism years ago was right and true, and that this story will give unprecedented insight into all the facets of a sex offender like John Gardner—the sweet, nurturing, loving and goofy guy his family once knew, the guy who seemed friendly and normal to people at the dog park, as well as the angry, manipulative and violent man who brutally raped and killed these poor girls.

I hope that we, as a society, can find ways to help people like him before they get to a breaking point or to stop them from doing harm after they’ve reached it. And I hope that with this book, we can learn something that will help protect us and our families from falling to the same fate as Amber Dubois, Chelsea King and Gardner’s third victim, Candice Moncayo, who lived to deliver a powerful victim impact statement to him during the sentencing hearing.

I did try to speak with Candice, as well as Chelsea’s and Amber’s parents, so I could pay a more personal tribute to each victim by hearing their stories directly rather than piecing them together from other sources, but they chose not to be interviewed. (I can’t tell these stories without writing about the victims and their families – they are why we tell these stories in the first place.) Instead, I respectfully crafted their stories from their own words in public comments to the media, public records and details I collected from interviews with law enforcement and other sources.

I understand that this was an enormously traumatic event in these families’ lives, and I hope they will understand that I had only good intentions in writing this book, that my goal was to educate people and to help prevent tragedies like this in the future. Some victims and their families have cooperated fully with me in my previous books, they have told me they found relief in doing so. They have also thanked me for my sensitive approach. But I can also see that others might find it too painful to do the same. I’m sure these events are still fresh in the minds of Chelsea and Amber's families, and that they are still grieving.

Nonetheless, I think we all want to change the system in a positive way, to save lives and to keep this from happening again. This is my way, and I hope they find some peace and success in theirs.

My hope is to continue my public education efforts at my upcoming book talks and signings. If you'd like to engage in the discussion, come hear how I put the book together or buy a signed copy, please join me at one of these upcoming events: 

Launch: July 5 at 6:30 pm at the Mira Mesa Barnes & Noble 

Or: July 7 at 3 pm at the Encinitas library, July 11 at 6:30 at the Oceanside Barnes & Noble, or July 21 at 3 pm at the Rancho San Diego library.

New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother, a Pulitzer-nominee who worked as a investigativer reporter for nearly 20 years, has written or co-authored eight books: Poisoned Love, Deadly Devotion/Where Hope Begins, My Life, Deleted, Body Parts, Twisted Triangle, Naked Addiction, and Dead Reckoning. Out on July 3 is Lost Girls about the murder of innocents Chelsea King and Amber Dubois by sexual predator John Gardner. For more information, please check her website, http://caitlinrother.com.

The Fourth Dimension

By: ZohrehGhahremani



A friend and I were having tea in the backyard when we both spotted a little bird perched on the fence. In his beak, he had the end of a cord tied to my climbingrose and kept on pulling. Naturally, he couldn’t succeed and each time he took a few steps back, he lost his grip. But the little fellow wouldn’t give up.

“I wish we had a video camera to tape this,” my friend said.

When the bird finally gave up and left, I cut a piece of the cord and loosely tied it to the fence for his next trip. The following day, the cord was gone and I imagined how he had carried it to be used in building a nest.

That little bird’s perseverance is just an example of the love all creatures manifest for their homes. While man has proven to be the epitome of homebuilders, he seems to have lost sight of what a home is for. It may be the place for peace and security for other animals, but our homes need to entertain and accommodate many guests. Then again, isn’t it this same aspect of life that makes life more meaningful?

The best reward of my success has been the chance it gives me to visit book clubs and meet people. Book discussions have brought me to many lovely homes, each with its own unique ambience. I am deeply touched as each host adds a “Persiantouch” in honor of my “Poppies” and admire the variety of their unique touches.If a writer has to finally leave her cave and come out to meet readers, I can’t think of a better way for it. I recently had another chance for such experience and suddenly realized that, when it comes to size, there are four dimensions to a home.

The address I had for this book club was closer to downtown San Diego, where I am less familiar. I printed the Google directions and drove to a nice neighborhood in San Diego. On a secluded side street of the peaceful neighborhood, I found number 4136 and climbed the few steps onto the front porch of a “craftsman house.” The door opened before I had a chance to ring the bell and I was met by the hostess and greeted by many readers. This was a familiar prelude to yet another book club meeting and their warmth reassured me of the good time ahead.

Following the initial introductions, the guests were ushered outdoors, where lunch would be served before beginning our book discussion. The sun was out, but the warmth that met us had little to do with it. The walled-in area was what Californians call an “Outdoor Living Room”. Over the years, I’ve seen and admired a variety of these, yet this one seemed to have an extra measure of ‘living’.

From the open verandah that offered a cool spot for a glass of wine to the beautifully set table under the umbrellas, the place shamed one into relaxation! Here, life became less serious and joy was the only choice. Even the hummingbirds held their own feast around a lovely bird feeder. I took in a deep breath and savored the scent of fresh gardenias.

The high walls reminded me of back home, where one could forget the city and enjoy privacy day and night. Indeed this small area was where there was life. M ywriter’s imagination could picture the hosts enjoying starry nights, when theonly light came from flames of the corner fireplace, or the moon above. Between pink hydrangeas and climbing vines, I saw more gardens here than I had seen in acres and acres of some neighborhood lawns. I could hear children running around and laughing at a Sunday barbecue. While our hosts went around to make sure their guests were happy, the garden grew bigger and bigger. Indeed there’s a fourth dimension to a home as it is love that decides its ultimate size.

Fo ra few days now the thought of that cozy backyard has stayed with me. How lost we are in our search for bigger homes, paying attention only to numbers. We each come to this world with a space within us and it can only expand if we share affection and let others into our hearts. How easy it is to neglect the fourth dimension.

I clip my roses and notice a new bird’s nest on our lemon tree. My daughter would know what kind of bird built this. To me, they are but little artistic nests for creatures that only need a place for a short while. Birds don’t ask for more, don’t need a larger space and never seem to stay long. In fact, the size of a nest often indicates to that of the bird. It’s us humans who need a bigger space to rest our caged souls.

I bring a few roses inside. I need these on my small kitchen table to expand the space. When we first moved in, I thought the kitchen was too small. But we no longer need a bigger one because as the years go by, this kitchen seems to grow.

The yellow roses look lovely on our table. My husband offers me a cup of coffee,Toby settles at my feet, and I suddenly realize ours is the biggest home in the universe.