Thank You

As I mentioned in my last blog, last week was a difficult one for me. I found myself questioning myself and many of the decisions I’ve made over the last several years. My self-confidence took a nosedive. My friends tried to boost my spirits with compliments and by pointing out my accomplishments but it wasn’t really working. I didn’t believe the compliments anymore and as for my accomplishments, like having published several books…well, that didn’t seem like such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I wasn’t able to use those achievements as a source of comfort or assurance. And then last night while suffering from yet another night of insomnia I started going through my reader emails. I get emails from readers all the time and I love each and every one of your notes but some of you have left a particularly strong impression on me. I’ve edited out names along with anything that would allow you to recognize someone’s identity but the following are a sampling of some of the notes & emails to which I’m referring:

(Of your books) I have only read So Much For My Happy Ending. In August I left my husband who assaulted me while I was just barely pregnant (I am no longer pregnant). I went away to stay with family for a while and when I came back a very good friend of mine told me to read this book. It was SO hard for me to read because I went through EVERY single one of those things...my ex did try to commit suicide and threatened it all the time. He went and bought me a $50K car without asking...I went through all of it. Anyways....I got through the book and cried at the last page. That very last page is hanging on my mirror so I remember how I felt when I read it and what it meant to me to start my life over....I have bought all your other books but have started back to school and so have been busy with that but they sit on my night stand and I hope to take them with me to Thailand this summer and read them while I am in the process of fulfilling a life long dream of teaching in another country...I do not know how you were able to write that with the detail you did but if anyone ever wants to understand what their friend is going through who is being abused, it is a good book to read. That book was life changing for me and I am so grateful to you for writing it.

And here’s another:

My Aunt was diagnosed with terminal cancer, my partner’s brother who is HIV+, was diagnosed with colon cancer. After getting this news my life was going downhill, that's when one day I found your book Sex, Murder, and a Double Latte, I bought it instantly, (myself being a Starbucks Barista). As soon as I read page one this book lifted my spirits, and parted the clouds that had been closing in. I owe you so much, I feel Thank You falls a little short. But I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that I am so grateful to have discovered you.

And another:

A friend bought me Sex Murder and a Double Latte when my daughter was born severely premature and had to remain in the hospital. It was her way of helping me take my mind off things - and that it did. I was so caught up in the novel I think I finished it in about 2 days. I even read it out loud to my daughter as she slept in her incubator. Anyways I just wanted to say thank you for writing such addictive novels. God bless you.

And…

When I read Passion, Betrayal And Killer Highlights I was very upset because I had to basically break my best friend's heart. I was so miserable that if I stopped for a moment to think about myself and my pain I probably would have cried a flood. It seems extreme to say so, but the thing that got me through the first hours of that was reading your book. As long as my head was buried in the book, everything was okay. It was an honestly engrossing book and I needed that to get through my own troubled time. I just wanted you to know your book helped when I was definitely at a low point.

There are so many other emails I could print. There’s the woman who found laughter through Sophie despite the intense fear she felt for her husband who is serving in Afghanistan, another woman who found a way to forgive herself for leaving her mentally ill but physically abusive husband after reading So Much For My Happy Ending... but if I printed them all I’d have a 10-page blog post. The point is that when I re-read these messages my perspective on things changed. If I accomplish nothing else the fact that I was able touch so many of your lives in such a meaningful way DOES matter in the grand scheme of things. Because of you I can consider myself to be truly successful, not just as an author but also as a human being. So for those of you who shared these stories with me and stories like these, thank you. Please know that you have helped me every bit as much as I have helped you.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com
And Pre-order Vows, Vendettas And A Little Black Dress Today!

The Rules Of Life...At Least My Life

For reasons I can't go into now it has been a challenging few weeks and many of those closest to me will tell you that for the last few days I've been hanging on by a thread. But as usual when things go wrong for me I find that the following holds true:

1) When the chips are down you find out who your best friends are
2) Desperation breeds creativity (BTW, desperation also creates great outfits...I always find fabulous new ways to put items/accessories together when I have "nothing to wear" but I digress).
3) My borderline breakdowns are both rare and almost always short lived
4) It is impossible to be really depressed while seriously rocking out to old Guns N' Roses singles
5) I am, and always will be, a survivor.

In regards to the second item on my list I honestly feel that within the last two days I may have done some of the best writing in my life and I did it during a time when I wasn't even sure I was capable of pulling together a coherent thought. That in and of itself makes me feel pretty good about myself.

As for the first item...well the truth is I have some amazing friends. People all over this state have gone seriously out of their way to be there for me. From offering to take care of my child at the last minute, to buying me truly decadent handmade truffles to those who have done research on certain things for me and sent me helpful articles, to those who know me well enough and long enough to know exactly what to say to help me focus...I could just go on and on. And there is one person who is actually working against his own interests in order to be of help to me while asking for quite literally nothing in return. That kind of friendship and selflessness is kind of breathtaking.

So thanks to rule one, rule two and a lot of Guns N' Roses I can honestly say that I think my breakdown is over (see rule 3) and I will survive and possibly...make that probably thrive (see rule 5).

Currently I'm feeling very hopeful about the future. For those of you who have been so supportive and helpful to me during this time I really need to thank you and for those of you who I'm close to who have NO idea what I'm talking about I promise to catch you up and please know that I didn't purposely exclude you from my personal drama (because I just KNOW you're anxious to be part of all my personal dramas, right?). But I'm not going to be able to catch you up tonight...tonight I have to channel my dwindling desperation and write a kick-ass chapter for what I think will (with a lot of work) end up being a kick-ass book.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!

The Flip Side Of Crazy

About a month ago I took my son to the airport so he could fly off to see his grandparents in the Bay Area. As it so happens there were other parents there putting their unaccompanied minors on the same plane My son struck up a conversation with one of those parents, a man with kind eyes and a child around my son’s age and once our children had boarded that man stepped over to me and remarked on how smart my son was.

“Yes, smarter than me,” I laughed. “He’s always correcting my pronunciation of the various dinosaur names.”

The man nodded. “Those names are all Latin based, right?”

“Latin and Greek,” I confirmed. “Personally I like Astronomy. When astronomers discover a big black hole in the universe they name it a Black Hole. When they see a cluster of stars they call it Cluster of Stars. Nothing hard to pronounce and all very straight forward.”

“Well,” the man said solemnly, “perhaps the reason the terms in paleontology are more difficult is because our Creator doesn’t want us to fully understand some things.”

Now I strongly believe that everyone is entitled to their own religious beliefs regardless of whether or not they agree with mine but what he was saying went WAY beyond creationism and because I’m….well, because I’m me and have a hard time keeping my mouth shut I went ahead and called him on it.

“So what you’re suggesting,” I said slowly, “is that God divinely inspired paleontologists to give the prehistoric animals they discovered Greek and Latin based names so that nonscientists would have a hard time pronouncing them? And the purpose of that would be that if you can’t pronounce something you’re less likely to read about it?”

I fully expected him to accuse me of twisting his words or his meaning or whatnot but instead he owned up to it. “There are no coincidences in this world,” he said. “For instance, numerology tells us that all numbers mean something. The first number of our children’s plane flight is 3 which stands for communication, interaction and neutrality. That’s a good number for a plane flight.”

At this point I’m thinking this guy is a little crazy.

And yet I bet it’s a lot easier to be him than it is to be me. He can look at the numbers on a plane flight and decide whether or not that’s the flight to take. He looks for what he feels are mystical but definitive signs and they give him direction. There may be uncertainty in his life but he is blissfully unaware of it.

But I don’t see the world that way. I don’t believe that EVERYTHING has a deeper meaning. Sometimes a 3 is just a 3, sometimes scientists like to give things weird names and while I do believe in God I have never believed in divine intervention. That means that while I can pray to give thanks for the world we live in I personally can’t ask God to fix things for me. I can make major life decisions based on the logical and solid information available to me and personal preferences but no number or deity or special sign can assure me that my decision is truly the right one.

So maybe this man isn’t so crazy. Maybe he’s just found a belief system that has made it easier for him to stay sane.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!

A Social Networking Site For The Anti-Sobriety-Hipster

Okay, you know it is VERY rare that I simply reprint something I've read in this blog but this email (forwarded to me by my friend Kim) is just WAY to amusing not to share. And the best part is that DrinkedIn is a real site. So for all you functioning alcoholics out there, we finally have a social networking site designed to fit your needs! Enjoy:

You can't help but feel like social networking sites just aren't doing any good.

Sure, there are Facebook pages raising money for Haiti, Iranian protests on Twitter and some hilarious cat videos on MySpace.

But we're talking about really doing some good. Like helping you find a new favorite cocktail.

Welcome to DrinkedIn, a new site devoted to drinking and only drinking, online now.

Now, first things first: despite the name, this doesn't work a damned thing like LinkedIn. But that's okay—you're not here to get a job promotion, post a résumé or poke anyone. No, this is about drinking—where to do it, what to have and who to have it with. (Think of it as a one-stop resource for all the things you'll forget the morning after.) And all with a puzzling user interface that suggests its designers might have been drinking when they designed it.

So you'll start by creating a profile declaring your favorite cocktail, and then you can begin reviewing pubs, rating drinks and arranging meetups with vodka-loving cheerleaders.

And you'll also find a carefully curated collection of videos about boozing—like this vintage clip of a pre-sweater Bill Cosby riffing on the nature of a good booze binge.

All without a single mention of Jell-O pudding.

Hope this put a smile on your face! Cheers!

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!

Haitian Adoption: Parents Struggle With Helplessness

Ever since I was a kid I've had this occasional but reoccurring nightmare. In it I'm living in 1930s Germany and...well, I probably don't have to explain why that would be a very bad thing. Now that I have a child I still have the dream a few times a year but now it's much worse. In my dream I know that my tall, blond fair skinned son has the physical characteristics to pass for Aryan if I were able to find a family to pretend that he is theirs. But I also know that emotionally he is incapable of successfully carrying off the deception and that by giving him to a Christian family I could easily be condemning both him and is intended rescuers to death. Of course I know that he isn't the only one in danger. I know that I will most likely die and that there's a good chance it won't be painless but that's not even a concern. I can handle anything except the knowledge that I am unable to protect my child. I realize that in the end I won't even know if he's all right or not and that's the part that wakes me up in a cold sweat.

Of course that's just a dream. I live in America in the 21st century and I CAN protect my son. I always know if he's all right or not.

But the American adoptive parents of all those Haitian children at Haitian orphanages right now are living my nightmare. Unlike in many countries, in Haiti families are matched with children early in the international adoption process so although an adoption almost always take upwards of 18 months the adoptive parents and the child have a relationship throughout that time. The parents are allowed to visit the children and communicate with them frequently and the children come to identify these people as their parents and call them mommy and daddy. For the adoptive parents these ARE their children and some of them were expecting their children to be allowed to come to the States to their home as early as this weekend. But now the buildings that held all the paperwork for these kids have been destroyed. To use the words of one woman who runs a Haitian orphanage, "These children no longer exist." They have no papers, no passports, no identification, no tangible proof that the Haitian government has approved their adoption.

And some of the orphanages have already run out of food and water. Parents in the US are being told that their children have survived but are in danger...and there's nothing they can do about it.

And then of course there are the Haitian parents and their children. Last night I watched a report on CNN: and 11-year-old girl was trapped under some rubble, her leg was crushed and she couldn't move. The newscaster held her hand and talked to her as the rescue workers struggled to free her. Eventually they did free her and got her to a hospital...where there were not enough supplies and no doctors qualified to do an amputation. According to her uncle her last words before losing consciousness were: "Mama, s'il te plaît ne me laisse pas mourir." (mama, please don't let me die). But her mother couldn't help her...But her mother couldn't help her...her mother wasn't even able to find her in time to sit by her side during her final moments of life.

My heart goes out to those families and I urge you, if you haven't donated yet text or send your donation today (you can give $10 by texting the word HAITI to 90999 and your donation will be added to your cell phone bill). You can also click here for a list of legitimate agencies that you can donate to who are helping. Even a $5 donation is incredibly helpful. The money will assist in the bringing of aid to Haiti, including those orphanages. It will help bring some semblance of order to the country and that will not only save the lives of many of the Haitian residents but will help expedite the process of getting these adoptions back on track.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!

Let's Have A Party Together ; )

For those of you who haven't heard, Vows, Vendettas And A Little Black Dress is now available to pre-order on Amazon, Amazon.uk and Amazon.ca (Canada). As usual I'm excited, anxious and eager to see how this next Sophie story is received by readers. Judging from the overwhelming number of emails, tweets and Facebook messages I've been receiving asking for news of a book tour it would seem that you are also excited to talk to me (in person) about the upcoming novel.

But here's the horrible truth about book tours...they have fallen out of fashion with the publishing industry. Once upon a time if you were given any kind of publicity budget from your publisher there was a strong chance that some kind of tour or public appearance would be part of the plan. Now, in the face of a very tough economy and an ever-changing retail environment publishers are taking a good hard look at the numbers. They feel (perhaps understandably) that the people who go to an author's book signing would have bought that author's book no matter what. They also realize that most people who attend book signing events/reading buy the book WELL before the event so the sell through of books on the actual day of the event will be around half of the turnout. A strong turnout is about fifty people (with a sell-through of 25). An average turnout would be somewhere between ten and 15 (no joke) with a sell through of 5 to 7 books. It makes the individual book store happy and it frequently makes the author happy but it comes at the cost of airfare and a hotel room for the author along with a media escort to get her from her hotel to her signing event on time without getting lost, signage for the bookstore and hours spent by the publicity department setting up and coordinating the whole thing. As a result the people who are usually sent out on book tours these days are people who are celebrities in their own right. Hollywood and Washington types and a few A+-list authors. If you've seen an author speak recently who doesn't fit into one of those categories he probably funded the tour himself.

As someone with both a business degree and business experience I understand the reasoning of the publishers and I can't really tell them they're wrong. Economically book tours aren't good investments.

And yet I LIKE book tours. Book signings are my only opportunity to meet my readers face-to-face and I think that's important. After all, you are in a very real sense my boss. My publisher is more like a partner. They give me very helpful suggestions and they package and distribute my work for me but YOU pay my salary. Plus the publisher will only want me as a partner as long as YOU want to keep me on payroll (which you do when you buy my books).

I honestly wish I could come and see all of you but realistically I'm going to have to be rather selective about this. In the past my most successful events have been planned and hosted by readers rather than booksellers or my publishing house (although those two entities have been extremely helpful in the execution of some of the details of those events). So if you are one of the readers who has recently contacted me with the hopes of hosting a book event for Vows, Vendettas And A Little Black Dress or if that sounds like something you would like to do, email me with plans. I'll pick a total of three events based on projected attendance (again, the idea is to meet as many readers as possible) and the creativity of the event itself (if Deb from Virginia is reading this I want to give you props again for the ghostly theme of your Lust, Loathing And A Little Lip Gloss event). The event doesn't necessarily need to be held in your home; in fact if you can assure them a turnout of over thirty people most larger bookstores will be happy to offer you their space and assistance (and I can help put you in touch with the right people if it comes down to that).

For those of you who can't put together a large event, or if your event isn't chosen I will be happy to attend your party via webcam. Maybe we can have a bunch of Little Black Dress parties across the country and with the help of the internet attend each others events and enjoy cocktails together.

Again, I wish I could make a personal appearance in the hometown of every one of my readers. I will do everything I can to continue to connect and correspond with you. I am eternally grateful for your support and your friendship whether it's expressed in person or via Twitter/Facebook/email, it means a lot to me.


Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!

Metrosexuals: Not Hot.

When I first moved to LA I assumed that the majority of the guys that I happened to be meeting were gay. Now I realize that I was wrong, it's just that many (although not all) of the straight men here do things that only gay guys do in other parts of the country. They make appointments for their bimonthly manzillians, they don't smile for pictures because it makes their wrinkles show and they carry around hand lotion so they can keep their skin baby soft. And then they do other things that my gay friends would never do...not because it's too butch but because it's too girly. They read their horoscope every day. They go to psychics and talk about the male and female energy of the sun. They read self-help books and quote pithy affirmations that they probably got from some calendar that has kittens on it.

I honestly don't get it. It's like they took the most difficult parts of being a woman and claimed it as their own. And why? Surely not for the women of this city. I've lost count of how many of my female-LA friends have wistfully told me that what they really need is a man. Not a metrosexual, not some yoga addict with a "vision board" and a weekly appointment at a tanning salon. No, they want a MAN. That's not to say women want men to let themselves go. By all means get a decent hair cut, wear clothes that flatter you, workout, eat healthy and if you've got a hairy back wax that stuff off but that woman you overheard complaining about hairy men? She honestly wasn't talking about your pubes and unless your name is Michael Phelps keep the razor on your face and off your legs.

And enough with all the talk about being a spiritual being and the power of positive thinking. We get it. You're not a negative person, you appreciate nature and the world that you live in above all else. All of that would come across as a lot more genuine if instead of telling us what your life philosophy is you showed us through your actions. When you're spending hours every day looking in the mirror, tweezing out that one errant chest hair, finding the fine line in need of collagen, the whole I-am-a-spiritual-being thing sort of takes on an ironic twist that I don't think you're aware of. But aside from that it also sounds like you're quoting a Hallmark greeting card that was specifically designed for the New Age Vegan set. Women generally aren't into that. Again, no one's saying that you need to sound like John Wayne from a 1950s western. A lot of women (including myself) like intellectuals. But quoting The Secret or the "wise" cheery words emailed to you from greatday.com isn't intellectual. It's just kinda annoying.

So guys, if this post describes you the good news is you don't have to wax your balls anymore. Yay! The bad news is that you might have to grow a pair.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!

Happy New Decade!

It occurred to me on New Year's Eve that I wasn't just seeing out the end of a year but an end of a decade. That really put a different spin on things. Sure, I didn't accomplish everything that I had hoped to in 2009 but what I've been through and what I've achieved in the last ten years is actually kind of extraordinary. That probably sounds conceited and God knows I'm perfectly aware of all my shortcomings but still, in this case extraordinary pretty much sums it up.

My son was six months old when this decade started, I had just finally gotten my bachelor's degree (it took me a while since I transferred schools so many flippin' times) and my father, my father-in-law and my grandmother (who I was VERY close to) were still alive. There were so many cities that I was dreaming of living in. I knew San Francisco would always be my home in some ways but nearby towns like Sausalito and far away cities like New York continued to beckon to me. Los Angeles was NO WHERE on my list of desirable living areas. Nothing about THAT city appealed to me at all. I had also recently quit my job at Nordstrom in order to stay home with my son and was perfectly content to let my then-husband support us for a while until my boy was old enough for preschool. The fissures in my marriage were showing but things weren't horrible and divorce was literally unthinkable. Oh, and my in-laws had already asked if I might be interested in homeschooling what was then their one and only grandchild and I told them that I'd rather walk through the fires of hell.

I wasn't even considering the prospect of writing a novel. I hadn't so much as written a short story since my freshman year in high school.

Now, ten years later I'm living in LA and to my total shock I actually really like it. But my father is gone. So is my father-in-law and my grandmother who I still occasionally dream about. Instead of supporting me my husband came close to financially ruining me and my marriage has long-since been over. My little baby has grown into a ten year old kid and his paternal grandmother now has eight grandchildren instead of one. And guess what? I've been homeschooling my child for almost two years (although you could argue that I did have to go through hell before actually resigning myself to it).

By the time June comes around I will have written and published six novels. In 2006 my Italian publisher put me up in Milan so I could do an Italian book tour and press conference. There's a Kyra Davis Fans page on Facebook with over 200 members!

How could all of that have happened in ten years? It's like I'm living an entirely different life now, one that I could NEVER have predicted. I lost everything that I thought I wanted and it was replaced with what I never even dreamed was possible. Ten years later and I still can't wrap my head around it.

I can't exactly say I have any regrets. Of course I wish my father-in-law had beaten cancer. I loved him and although my marriage was doomed to failure I think that if my father-in-law had been alive he would have intervened when things got ugly during the divorce and the transition process and healing would have been easier for everyone, including my ex-husband. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think so. I wish my grandmother had lived long enough to see me publish my first book. She sooo wanted to have a writer in the family and she died before I had even picked up a pen to write the first sentence of my novel. I wish my father had lived to see the first black man elected president. That would have meant so much to him. But those aren't exactly regrets, just fate doing its thing and although my father-in-law and father both died young I think they would both agree that they had lived full lives and they were surrounded by loved ones at the end. As for my grandmother, she didn't really want to be here after my grandfather died in 1997 anyway and I like to think that wherever she is she knows that there finally is a writer in the family.

As for my career itself, well I don't even know what to say about that. Granted, I'm not J.K Rowling or anything close to an A-lister in the literary world but still, to go from never writing stories to publishing six books in less than ten years? Even to me that doesn't seem possible and I'm the one who did it!

So in the end it was a pretty good decade and I'm excited to see what the next decade will bring. But I won't make any predictions. If there's one thing the last ten years have taught me is that I can only expect the unexpected.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!