 For our good friend and debut author Susan Ritz, this is a special night when we get to celebrate with a friend. We've been all waiting for this for a long time, not as long as Susan does, but we're honored to host Susan to celebrate the publication of her fabulous and much-anticipated novel, A Dream to Die For, which was recently featured in a list of new releases on the Ladies of Horror fiction website. A Dream to Die For is mystery set in a fictional Riverton Falls, but I think it'll be pretty clear to everybody in this room where it really is. It's a deliciously atmospheric novel with a great sense of place, a great place, and a lot of very fun local details and some of you might even recognize yourselves. Susan will be reading for her book and take some questions and then we'll have cake and refreshments. Some of you can see those, but they're back there and we'll celebrate some more. So thank you and please help me welcome Susan Ritz. Okay, I'm gonna cry. Thank you all so much. I can't believe it. It's just like overwhelming. I wrote this book like a love letter to this town and so there's so many people that I want to thank. I'm gonna start with Bear Pond books, the amazing, wonderful Bear Pond books, and especially Claire because every time I came in for about the past seven years, when are you gonna finish that book? So I kind of got guilted into it and I finished it. I think you're all here because you've been hearing me talk about this book for ten years and I am so thrilled and I also want to thank my wonderful writing group. I'm not gonna name everybody because it'll take too long. My women's group, my wonderful neighbors and very talented neighbors who helped me write this and they're all acknowledged in my book. And I also want to thank Ruth Stock Publishing for publicizing and helping me get this show on the road. They've done an amazing job. And I want to thank She Writes Press, my great publisher and my She Writes sisters who are here. So yeah, I know you've all heard about this book forever. So finally you're gonna get to hear the book. And by the way, if you want to come back or you have friends that couldn't squeeze in here, I am gonna be reading again on September 15th out in Calis at Words Out Loud and the Kent, great Kent show that they have out there in September. I hope somebody will be there because you're all here. Okay, I want to start just by reading my epigraph which is, The World is Under No Obligation to Make Sense to Us and that's from my dear friend, Eric Sensi, who we all miss very much. Alright, so I'm gonna read three parts and I hope it's not too long. Okay, the first chapter. Morning in Riverton Falls. Or Montpeliers is better known. Celeste reached for the remnants of last night's dream. She'd woken gasping for breath, throat raw and sore as if she'd been screaming in her sleep. A woman at a window, bushes blowing in a soft breeze, a shadow coming at her from behind. She'd scribbled down the disjointed images in her journal before she'd even opened her eyes but now the morning had whisked the rest away. Still she couldn't shake the feelings of panic and guilt. She tried again to find a thread that would lead her back in but it was too late. Battered old Mr. Coffee burped and spluttered the last drops of Java into her carafe. Celeste poured herself an oversized mug and stumbled back to bed to see what she could figure out. Proped against a pile of pillows she opened the black leather notebook and sipped her coffee. Nothing in the trio of lines she'd scratched out in black ink explained why the dream left her feeling both frightened and ashamed. At least nothing she could figure out on her own. She wondered what Larry would make of the dream, the last she would share with him after four years of therapy. All that time Celeste had tracked her dreams, learning to decipher the letters and words she'd jotted down, often with eyes still closed on the unlined pages of her journal. She poured out hundreds of dreams, some just scraps or a single startling image, others pages long like surreal short stories. But now if she could stick to her plan she was done. Today was the day she was going to tell him she was quitting and there was no way he was going to talk her out of it again. She'd had enough of Larry Blatsky, his dreamers and this thing he called the dreamscape, the thing Jake called a cult. Celeste tossed the journal onto the heap of library books, magazines and last Sunday's New York Times that littered the floor next to her side of the bed. Jake's side was as neat and uncluttered as it had been since he'd moved out six weeks earlier. She rolled over onto the smooth, cool sheets and there was no trace of Jake there, no scent on the pillow she hugged to herself. Larry will destroy you, she remembered Jake saying the night he left as he jammed his clothes into his duffel bag. This isn't a game Celeste, he'll turn you into someone you don't even know or recognize, that's what he does, believe me. I've seen it and I can't stay and watch it happen to you. She shook her head trying to dislodge the memory. If Jake were still there, lying where he'd been the whole six whirlwind months of their engagement, she knew she could go through with her plan. Get down there and tell them it's over, he'd say, the callous fingers of his guitar strummer's hands on her cheeks, pulling her face to his for a good luck kiss. Without Jake to back her up though, Celeste wondered if she had it in her. She tried to stand up to Larry before, but he'd always left the therapy session feeling defeated and hopelessly mired in what he called her demon mind. The labyrinth of self-loathing and doubt Larry had unearthed and then used to control her. Not this time, she thought, getting up to raise the shade to the one November light. Larry wasn't going to win while she still had a chance of happiness. She'd waited too long for the enlightenment he'd promised. Now all she wanted was love. She was going to get Jake back in her bed where he belonged. Alright, so that's the setup. So this next part is a flashback and you just heard her preparing for her final trip to Larry and this is her first trip to Larry. She remembered entering that waiting room for the first time. How she followed behind as Larry led the way into his utilitarian office. Sit, he said, and she lowered herself onto the chair closest to his desk without taking her eyes off the strange man in front of her. This was the famous Larry Blatsky. He looked like a displace beach mom in his cut-offs, flip-flops, and Hawaiian shirt which barely hit his insipient punch. No one Celeste would watch grow into a bulging belly over the next four years. She wasn't sure what she expected but this unkempt appearance made her wonder why he didn't even try to look professional. She jumped, the sound of a command then turned to find in the corner pacing freely along a perch, a bobbing parrot. Shut up, Pete! Larry admonished his pet before turning the full force of his attention on Celeste. Okay, let's see here, Celeste Fortune. That's some kind of name all right. Were you born with that or did you acquire it? Well, I'm not married if that's what you mean. Nah, just thought it was kind of a name like, let's say a stripper I used to know. And you do look kind of familiar. Not sure why. Larry laughed. So what's your problem? He rushed on without waiting for her to respond. Why are you sitting here today? He crossed his hands over his belly, leaned back and put his feet up on the desk. Mostly curious I guess. Celeste tried to sound nonchalant and maybe to work on some minor issues that have come up recently. She hadn't meant that to come out as a question but he already had her flustered. This had always been his game to knock her off balance right from the get-go. Every time she sat down across from him then he'd peer over those half rimmed glasses, his chin resting on his hammy hands, never nodding or giving any indication that he'd heard her just like that first day. She finally figured out it was one of those therapist tricks to get you to say more than you intended to to fill up the silence. Right from the beginning she was a sucker for it. Actually, I guess I've been feeling a little depressed, sort of unsettled. I thought maybe you would give me some motivation to make some changes in my life. Larry smiled looking like he understood exactly what she meant. I'm willing to bet there's a lot more to it than that. Let me tell you what I see in front of me. Then you tell me if I'm wrong. Celeste nodded, wondering what he could possibly know about her if she'd hardly open her mouth. I see a woman too scared to go after what she really wants in her life, who doesn't believe she can get in anyway, and who covers it all up by pretending everything's hunky dory. All the indicators of what I call false independence. He paused for a breath scanning her astonished face. Besides, I'm willing to bet you have a lot of guy issues. So I'm completely, not completely convinced this will work out between us, but I'm willing to give it a try if you are. This man had extra vision. He's three and three were faster than anyone she'd ever met. No wonder he'd considered rejecting her right off the bat. He'd probably known from the start that she'd be trouble. Somehow though, she managed to hang on. So, Cel, tell me what do you know about the dreamscape? Cel, no one called her Cel, not since her father and she'd never liked it when he had. The dreamscape, she shoved her shoulders. Only what I've heard from your clients at the bar where I work. Oh yeah, so not a lot, figures. Larry furiously typed a few sentences into his computer. The dreamscape he began is something I've been developing for about 20 years now. The shortest way I can describe it is this. He stood up from the computer, walked over to the window and half sat on the sill, arms folded as he began to lecture. The dreams, Cel, are the way you're going to discover who you really are. They're the gateway to your vital self. You gotta go way down deep here, Cel, down below your thinking mind, below your subconscious, down to your heart and soul. So let's try to listen, but her mind kept wandering as the word sailed past her. The dreams are your healing guides, Larry said. They're going to help me rip off that mask of false independence and find that sad little girl you stuffed away long ago. Celeste had no idea what girl he was talking about. Maybe this was too far over her head. Maybe she shouldn't have come. Now close your eyes. Tired after working late the night before, she nodded sleepily in the chair. A loud slap startled her. Her eyes flew open. Larry was walking toward her. As he came closer, the room darkened as if a cloud had passed over the sun. Celeste watched, transfixed as the short, stocky man seems to transform in front of her, growing taller, the edges of his body shimmering with a glacial blue light. His eyes bore into her as he stepped closer. She cowered in her chair. Larry hovered above her, filling the room until the walls fell away and they were where? On an empty plane, wind whipping about her, she looked into the face of an ancient shaman or a bearded prophet filled with fire, calling her name. Let go now, the giant figure bellowed. Drop that mask. Drop the costume you wear to cover the nakedness of your heart. Show me the girl who is hiding in you. Bring her forth and let her dance on this altar we are building together. The voice crashed through her like an axe, splitting a log into kindling. This woman must crash and burn, stoke the fire, step into the flames. A hot wind blew across her face, circled her head, ruffling her hair. The dreamscape is demanding. The dreamscape is dangerous. It will force you to face yourself, to face the truth of your life. Step into the dream cell. Let your authentic life begin. Yes, yes, that's what I want, Celeste heard herself say. Desire surged through her white heat, pulling her to this alluring magician. The boundaries of her body dissolved with longing for whatever it was he was offering. The room filled with magnetic energy crackling with static electricity. Take this chance to become who you truly are. Tear down those walls and free that girl. Together we will take her from the darkness and bring her back to the light. Larry slapped the desk again and suddenly as it had begun the show was over. Sunshine streamed through the window. Larry was once again the squat man with bad hair and a three-day old beard. All the exciting energy ebbed as Celeste's familiar defenses reassembled around her as if Larry had flipped a film in reverse. Did you bring a dream, he asked, back in his chair as if nothing had happened. Okay. You kind of get the feeling it's a weird kind of book. So now I'm going to... Celeste went to her final meeting with Larry as she planned and she did get to tell him her dream, the three little pieces. And when she told it to him he freaked out and looked like he was having a heart attack and said get out and never come back. So she did. And now she remembers later, oh my gosh, I forgot something back in the office. I have to go get it. It's a very important item. When you read the book you'll find out what it is. So she goes back and this is what she finds. Celeste turned the handle on the door slowly pushing it open. The waiting room was empty. It looked the same as when she'd left just a couple of hours before, not a doily or a single pillow disturbed. The air though seemed charged with tension and hinted of something sweet and flowery. She tiptoed to the inner half open office door. Larry? At first she didn't understand what she was seeing. There on the floor his big belly spilling out between his jeans and his flowered shirt lay Larry his face ashen pale as his hair and stubbly beard. Had she really given him a heart attack or a stroke? Then she saw the blood. It pulled beneath his head soaking into the beige carpet. Celeste grabbed onto the door frame. She tried to keep herself upright but her legs felt like waterlock sponges. Just the mention of blood had always made her feel woozy. But now the actual sight of it and the raw metallic smell forced her gagging to her knees. Run, she told herself, get help! But as Larry had so often reminded her, she rarely followed her own best instincts. Instead of running away, she found herself crawling over the threshold. Inching closer to the first dead body she'd ever seen. At least he looked dead. He didn't seem to be moving. The crystal she'd been holding just two hours earlier lay in a sticky puddle of blood. Its sharp gray edges smeared with red. The gore sent another wave of nausea rushing into her throat. Celeste swallowed hard. Daring herself, she reached out, trying to steady her hand to push it just that much further across the small space, separating her from Larry's body. Suddenly Larry's head rolled to the side. Her hand snapped back straight to her mouth, muffling a scream. At the strangled sound, Larry's eyelids twitched open and she found herself looking straight into his unfocused blue eyes. Not you! He managed to hiss before his eyelids dropped again. Okay, so... That's the book. Um, yeah. So, questions? I know you're all just waiting for the wine and crackers and cheese. Anybody? Yes, Kim? A peeler or River Town City whatever it's called that made it appealing for this setting. Oh, small towns are the best place for crime stories. Everybody knows each other. Everybody knows the backgrounds of everybody. Everybody knows the gossip. So, um, everybody becomes a suspect in a book like this. And it's a small town, so... And, uh, you'll read it and find out. Diane, you know, I never really read Mysteries. Oh, I wrote a mystery. So, I'll tell you some of my favorite mystery writers, and they don't... I think they kind of inspired me. I don't know where... I have no idea where all this came from, but I really love Tana French and who writes the Dublin Mysteries, and she's got some kind of that weird edge. Kind of... If there's something weird in her books, especially her last book, The Witch Elm, I like Maisie Dobbs, and I like the Mary Russell series by Lori King, which is about Sherlock Holmes' wife. But I don't know if they inspired me. I think it was just sort of like my imagination going wild. Oh, I know one other person that inspired me was Jerome Lanier, and I don't know if you've ever heard of him, but he's the inventor of virtual reality. And I've read several interviews with him and a couple of his books, and his idea of what the world could be if we used computers not to isolate us, but to connect us and make us more intimate with each other and more able to share ourselves not necessarily through words, but through the thoughts in our minds. So that really set me off on a path of just knowing his thinking, and I really admire him. Oh, yeah. That's about the fifth draft. There were a whole lot of drafts here. I think the point that it... I had to do it over and over, because when I first wrote this, I didn't even know who did it. I had to write to the end to find out. I had really, I had no idea. I really thought it was somebody else. But as I said on my friend Shayla's podcast yesterday, which you'll be able to find on my website, I had to put together a whiteboard with all the people in it, and then I had to figure out why this person could be a suspect and where they were at the time of the murder and why they might not be a suspect. And eventually those things, I just started realizing there was a convergence, and I hadn't even seen it. And so when that happened, I was able to finish the book. Yeah, and have it kind of make sense. I hope. Susan, did I first think I was going to start writing a mystery? I wrote, I did, because I have a really good friend who's a writer, and he said, well, when you write a book, make sure there's a mystery in it. So I went, well, okay, I'll write a mystery. But the thing about writing a mystery is it's already done for you. I mean, there's a template to a mystery. And if you watch enough TV, murders, shows, or you read enough mystery books or listen to them on audio or whatever you do, we all listen to mysteries sometime or other. We've all seen mysteries in movies, and they all follow the same pattern. They have red herrings, they have clues, they have people you think did it, people who didn't do it, and they all have a pretty much the same arc of it building up. And then big information dumped in one chapter and then all of a sudden it all comes together and makes sense. And so since I had no idea how to write fiction, because I am an MFA in creative nonfiction, I decided it would be probably easier to write a mystery where the template was already there than to try to figure out how to plot something totally different. And thanks to my writing group who all are fiction writers, I learned to write fiction through doing this. Okay, so Ron asked me, which were the easiest characters to bring to life and which were the hardest? Well, Larry was really easy. Easy to bring to life or easy to kill? Both. So the hardest person to bring to life was me, who's Celeste. That's not really me, but a lot of her is me and her dreams are my dreams and the sessions that she has reflect some sessions I had in therapy once upon a time. So I, as I said, I have a creative nonfiction degree and I'm supposed to write memoir. I cannot write memoir because I can't talk about myself. So this was my chance and that was really hard to create the character of Celeste, who's the main character, even though she has a lot of my characteristics and insecurities and anxieties and all the other things, which I didn't really realize I'd written them until I read some reviews. I found out I was a flawed character. Anyway, that's how it goes. Yeah, the rest of them, everybody was pretty easy as I went along, as I got to know them, as they told me who they were, as Paul said, that did happen. They told me who they were and I just kept following their lead. Catherine? Do I think I'm going to write another mystery? I do think I'm going to write another mystery because it's a really good way to avoid writing my memoir. So, stay tuned. The prequel to this is set in Indonesia. So, yeah. I hope I don't take ten more years to write it because... But with Celeste. With Celeste and her friend Gloria, the two main characters in this. Joe. How many people in this room know Larry? Larry doesn't exist. You probably know somebody like Larry. But it's not really about any real person. It really... I really is not. And I'll just tell you that this book was not inspired by anything that really happened. Nobody killed him. But I wrote this book because I once upon a time was in a... I was stuck in the middle between a very charismatic therapist and the man I was in love with who is my wonderful husband Ethan. Over there. Yeah. And so, actually, I'll tell you, Jake was maybe the hardest person to write because Jake is Ethan, and only I made him tell Dark and Handsome. So... Not that I don't think he's Handsome, but I just thought, you know, for a 40-year-old woman, she needed, you know, a really great, really hot guy. Um... You're really hot, too, honey. Um... Yeah. So... So that's the only real truth in this story is that that happened to me and that sort of was the seed that started this was... was that... that time in my life when I felt ripped in two. And it was... it was difficult and I needed to deal with it and this was the book that helped me deal with it. Garrett, my editors, how much impact did my editors have? Well, I published what she writes for us and my editors basically are all sitting in this room. So... My writing group and also wonderful Mary Elder Jacobson, who was my copy editor, and she had a big impact. And, um, if when you find anything poetic or a metaphor that follows through like that line I read about the logs and the kindling and then crash and burn, Mary did that. So, um, she had a big influence on the language and making it just a more beautiful book, I think. And then, um, I had these wonderful, wonderful neighbors, Catherine Davis and Eliza Thomas and my writing group and, um, they read this book like a hundred times. So, they helped me a lot. They were my editors and I am forever grateful. Thank you. Well, I definitely believe that writing is a collaborative act and a communal act and especially for women. Nobody does it alone. At least I didn't do it alone and I thank everybody who has their fingerprints and their marks on this book because it's definitely, if I'd been left to myself this wouldn't happen. This wouldn't have come out and it wouldn't be the book that it is. Um, so many great ideas came from so many different places and so many different people. Again, I'm very grateful. Okay, guys. Um, I'll sign books now. I hope there's enough wine back there, but, um, if not, how many don't know how much it means to me to see this from so many people?