I'm going to give it a minute where people come into the room, seconds to get right on six o'clock. All right. Hi, everybody, and welcome to San Francisco Public Library in the virtual world. You're here tonight, I hope, for Grotto Night to the library. And tonight's theme is Why We Love Mysteries, the Genre and Motif of Discovery. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I'm Michelle Jeffries with San Francisco Public Library. Before we get started, let me begin with a land acknowledgement. San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Romantician people who were the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland, and as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples, in which to pair respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Romantic community. Please consider supporting the Sogorete Land Trust, the first indigenous women led urban land trust in the country. And please tell us in the chat if you'd like what land you're coming to us from today. And then before we, again, I also want to tell you about a few upcoming library programs. Share some slides here. Again, it's not too late for us to participate in the Library's annual summer reading program. Summer stride, come in, tell us you read for 20 hours, get a beautiful tote bag. Bring your family, everybody, summer stride, summer learning is for all ages. Later this month, we have our on the same page book club. The book this month is the next two months is When We Were Sisters by Fatima Askar. We have a book club coming up on August 21st. And then Fatima will be here for an author talk at the main library at Harnell Center on August 27th. And then really excited, we have a writing workshop and author talk with Grant Faulkner, whose new book is The Art of Brevity, crafting the very short story. Of course, Grant is the founder of Nano Remo, National Novel Writing Month, and he'll also be in conversation with Faith Adili. And so it'll be a talk and a chance to practice your flash fiction in the room. It'll be really fun. That'll be here at the main library on August 31st. And also this month later, this month at a non-library, but when we were a library location, the Four Star Theater, where we will be screening films, Mission Love, a series of 70s, radical films about permission. So join us on Saturday, August 26th. Share some love, help us be out at the Four Star, our neighborhood movie theaters, really be in community together with the library and film fans. All right, back to Grotto Nights. Let me tell you a little bit about our Grottoans for the night, and then they'll take it away. So we have Terry Tierney, who's had his stories and poems published in more than 70 literary journals. He holds a PhD in Victorian literature and his college composition and creative writing. Also, he's been a software engineering manager in Silicon Valley. Terry is the author of The Poets Garage and the novel Lucky Ride, and his newest novel is The Bridge on the Air River. We also have Pia Chatterty, which she's a writer and essayist, and her work has been published in CNN, The Chronicles, 7x7, Alta Magazine, Zizava, Hyphen, and others. She's also participated in Liquid, our favorite, and attended workshops at Tin House and Red Loaf. She received the Ledge Prize for fiction, who's named the Emerging Fellow at the San Francisco Writers Grotto, and was a finalist for the Red Loaf Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. And we have Sophia Roday, who's the author of Love and Condition Yellow, a memoir of an unlikely marriage. She is currently working on a cozy mystery set in the Bay Area featuring retired women cops. Sounds fantastic. Through her She-Flex social media accounts, she celebrates the joy and power of experienced women whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Slate, and Politico.  Thank you. I'll need to unmute yourselves. So I wanted to say a few words about what we're going to do tonight. So, but first of all, I wanted to thank the San Francisco Public Library for hosting us and the San Francisco Grotto for curating the event. And please check the San Francisco Grotto website for our classes and in other events. So not tonight, Sophia, Pia and I will be discussing why we love mysteries, the genre and motif of discovery. So each of us is planning to read a short sample of our current our current work. And then we'll intersperse that with a discussion of how we came to incorporate the motifs of discovery in our writing and and also how we progressed with regard to that motif and our writing in general. So so first of all, I'd like to turn it over to Pia and she can start us off. Thanks, Terry. So for me, it all started with the pandemic.   I found my mind like really not being able to focus on anything for very long. And I've always been, you know, I grew up in Nancy Drew's and Hardy Boys and the Catholic Christie's and I found myself like wanting that comfort of the mystery genre where truth is served and, you know, things happen, but the people want to fix that thing, you know. And like everyone said, there's something within the mystery motif, which is kind of a community building and people kind of want to do the right thing.  So I found myself reading a lot of these very comforting to me. Stories like Anne Cleves and Ruth Rendell and Elizabeth George. And then I found myself as I was reading, sorry, I was also watching a lot of these kind of shows on television dead to me and big, little lies. And I found like more and more as I was reading these books that no, it was the world it presented was very Caucasian, you know, there was very rarely a person of color that was very rarely like an Indian woman. And there were some Indian murder mysteries, but they were very often a little bit comical, you know, or said in India, very, very rarely was there a working mom, you know, like they would say they had a kid, but they somehow left the kid behind and went into the. So it just sounds like the world evoked wasn't a world that was very welcoming of me, even though I love that world. So there was no way to go and no one to meet during the pandemic. So I began to write and I began to write basically a murder mystery. And now I have an agent. I'm trying to like and we'll talk more about that later. I'm trying to like do some edits, but that's kind of how it's starting.  Yeah, Pia, some a lot of similarities. I didn't even think about it. But I think I also the pandemic was a factor with I've always loved mysteries, but I started reading like I started allowing myself to read them primarily instead of just kind of like once in a while. And also and I'll get into this more later. But I also found that there is a kind of the most common protagonist is a 28 year old woman, unmarried woman, whose mother wants her to get married.  And there weren't like these dynamic women in, say, their 50s and 60s that I saw. If anybody knows anybody like that as a protagonist, I'd love to hear about it. But this is my first mystery and I'm just starting it really. I mean, I'm in my first draft and there's some twists and turns like any good story to how I got there. But I've always used writing to grapple with like my own relationships and bigger social issues. So, for example, my first book, Love and Condition Yellow, was about my courtship and marriage to my political opposite. I was a lefty activist and and my now husband is a police officer and soldier. So the book had to do with like our personal story, but it also used that story to kind of have a lens into the country's divides and even some ways in which people can overcome those differences. And so more recently, that book came out in 2009. In the interim period, I reached midlife, they tell me. And I became aware that despite stereotypes to the contrary, my generation is the healthiest, wealthiest, most numerous and most powerful group of women 50 plus ever to walk the planet. So I wanted to celebrate that joy and power. And Michelle mentioned I have this mainly Instagram social media project called She Flex. And so please join us if this resonates with you. And as I was doing that and thinking about some of the amazing women in my life and about our friendships and what longer writing project I wanted to do. I had been listening and listening. I do a lot of audiobooks and reading mysteries. And I realized that the writers that I like the most, writers like Louise Penny and Richard Osman. I came to see that the mystery was it was important, but it also acted as this frame for. To explore character and relationships and even to have some gentle social commentary. And that really appealed to me. So I've been wanting to explore ideas of women's power and the depth of connection and love that can only happen between women after decades. And a mystery seemed like a really good way to do that and be fun and entertaining at the same time. So, Terry, how about you? So, Terry, how about you? Thanks. Yeah. I wanted to mention that the first novel that I actually tried to write was a murder mystery. So a baseball murder mystery that I wrote when I was in graduate school, when I should have been working on my dissertation. But I never actually got that published, although I did complete a complete a rough draft. But the techniques of discovery and and and learning, you know, the characters, learning about themselves and learning about others is something that, you know, pervades, pervades my writing. You heard that I was also a Victorian that I have a degree in Victorian literature.  So there's a lot of, you know, motif of discovery throughout literature. In my new in my new novel, it's it's based on Binghamton, New York, where I used to live and it's a it's a rundown Rust Belt town and people are scrabbling to to make a living, you know, fighting alcoholism, you know, unemployment, you know, various love problems. And the narrators are this kind of big, rather scary, you know, former Marine, scary to his enemies anyway, but he's but he's kind to his friends. And so he becomes kind of a magnet of for people coming with their problems and asking them to help them, you know, sometimes, you know, it's outside the law. But but but but that's that's his nature. And he likes to try to he likes to try to help people. So a lot of the stories kind of progress along the the motif of, you know, here's a problem, here's here's an issue that we need to uncover. And and and we we unwind that as we go through the story, you know, through, you know, some successive discoveries. And finally, finally, some some resolution. So so I think that I think that that's fun for the reader. And it's it's certainly as you both were expressing was certainly fun for me to write. Yeah, I love that I love just I've always loved codes and puzzles. And I love just following clues. It's almost like a little treasure hunt. And I think that's it's a very in some way, simple, but compelling way to hook people in. Agreed. And Terry, did you want to read a little slice for us from here? Yeah, I'll read a real short, a short section. So. This comes about in the middle of the novel. And it comes from a story called Message from the Vampire. And in this in this story, you know, Kurt is living in a rundown Victorian house that's been converted into apartments. He's working in the local dairy where he drives a forklift and stacks milk crates. But he has he has aspirations of learning how to work computers. And I should I should remind everybody this is a Reagan era. So so this was back when computers were driven by punch cards. So this is his message from the vampire. A loud ring shatters my sleep, growing louder with each cycle like a police car racing up the street. I stagger to the living room, kicking, kicking a beer can out of my way. The wall clock reads 1235. I snatched the telephone and hear a woman cry. Bubbling over with short breasts between sobs, drowning her words. I expect a different call waking me up.  My key punch skills are suspect, but not enough to make a vampire cry. I wait for the sobs to shorten the breasts deep in Kurt here. I'm so sorry, the woman says hoarsely before rising in another crescendo. I try to identify her voice. Gloria, she spurts out before I ask. Bill's wife. It takes me a few minutes to match the name with Sherman. No one calls him Bill at work, though I remember her calling him Bill when he invited me home to dinner last week to celebrate my new assignment. I'm so sorry to call you. Maybe he'll listen to you. She swallows back her tears. He thinks a lot of you. What's wrong? I ask, suspecting the answer. Sherman's affair with Julie has been the headline of Dairy Gossip for weeks. This morning in the break room, my friend, Renee, leaned across the steel table for white aprons smeared with ice cream, smelling like a carton of Neapolitan, whispering that Sherman and Julie were spied holding hands at Kmart. He hasn't come home yet. Gloria's sniffles leak between words. The sheer bulk of the passion between my boss and Julie has been an easy source of jokes, like my telling Renee this morning that the combined quarter ton was heavier than the daily run of ice cream. Our laughter now hollow echoes. I don't know where he is. Everyone knows where he is. Gloria counters her tone rising to anger. Do you remember Marshall? A curly toehead, Sherman's young son took a liking to me, his new toy that night. He waited by the door all night with his tomato basket, waiting for his daddy to take him outside to pick his tomatoes. Yeah, he's proud of his tomatoes, I respond. I'm so sorry I called you, I hardly know you. She resumes crying. Why would you want to break up our marriage and leave his kids? I shake my head, I'm sure what to say. I'm taking the kids back to Washington. I feel the way to Sherman's affair pulling me down. Will you talk to him and remind him we love him? Marshall and Sheila love him. She takes a deep breath. I love him more than anything. I don't know who else to call. Gloria, I feel horrible, but I don't see how I can change anything. He respects you. He would listen to you. She takes a deep breath. He would respect you for talking to him. No, I'm thinking he might just fire me for good. My employment is fragile.  Then he gave me a chance to learn computer skills by recording shipments after my shift, provided I stay out of trouble. Gloria treats my silence as a maybe. Please, Kurt, I trust you. I pull the receiver away from my head, feeling the blood rush back to my ear.  I can't promise anything. Just talk to him. Thank you. When I dropped the phone in its cradle, I know I should go back to bed, but I headed to the kitchen. I slid a can of Genesee out of the refrigerator and popped the top, throwing back a long swallow and thumping the door closed. The phone rings again. Why would Gloria call me back? Did I wake you up? Another female voice. I hear the word machinery and air conditioning. I'm already awake. Me too. It's Angie, the computer operator. Hi, Angie, I say uncertainly. This is the call Julie warned me about. Your input job failed and I fixed it. I want to show you what I did. I followed the manual. We all make mistakes. I get in around six. I started seven. Six PM, she says emphatically. Sure, anything for the dairy. What a trooper, she says with vain enthusiasm. Time to run the backup.  I have a big day tomorrow. First, I tell my boss to stop boning Julie. And then I go down to the morgue and meet the vampire. Thanks. That was excellent, Terry. That is not the vampire. And I take it your character is struggling a bit with. Does he perhaps struggle with alcoholism? I think you mentioned that, right? I could get that. Yeah, kind of kind of on and off. It's kind of an ongoing struggle with him and some of the other characters, too, of course. Well, I feel like I got to know him a little bit. So that was that was really wonderful. Thanks. So we thought we'd also talk a little bit about what we're thinking of as our journeys as writers, as we came to writing mystery, like what we've learned along the way about writing in general, what routines we have that kind of have helped us with our writing, our struggles in writing, especially as writers of mystery and or the motif of discovery. And I will start us off. I will confess that, you know, I as a writer, I kind of have struggled with plot. I loved my first project as a was a memoir because it the plot was like already set for me. I didn't have to really, you know, figure that out. And I got very lucky because I wrote a modern love column for the New York Times. And essentially, that led to a book deal. And at that point, I had someone I was accountable to, which helped a lot because with fiction and now with memoir, as you guys probably know, you have to write the whole thing first and there's nobody kind of cracking the whip, which is is hard in itself. And I know that because I have a YA novel. I spent six years writing that's in a drawer. And a very common pattern for me when I was writing that book was I would start to write and almost before I was aware of it, I would start to reread my work and edit it. And similarly, every day when I started to write, I would reread what I'd written sometimes all the way all the way to the beginning of the book, which is if I may offer suggestion as writers, don't do that. That is I wish someone had told me just keep moving forward, don't read more than a page to get you going or whatever. And then the other way I get stuck is I was writing and kind of generating plot as I went, which essentially means that there are truly an infinite number of like sort of folks in the road, right? And decisions along the way on those forks. And so I would get paralyzed at times or overwhelmed by the number of those decisions. So long story short, my writing was pretty slow and sort of sort of agonizing on that project. So when I started to think about a new project and I was like, I told you, I was reading a lot of mysteries and watching also a lot of shows on TV. It was the pandemic and and I came to realize started keying in on the plot and the story. And I realized these plots, like I kind of mentioned before, they're they're not rocket science. They're just a process of kind of following clues. And quite honestly, a lot of themes get repeated. I mean, it's good to have a little bit of a fresh take on some of the themes. But when I realized I thought, I think I can do that. You know, I could come up with a set of clues to follow. And then there will be this nice container which sort of takes the pressure off a writer like me. So I've done that for this this book. And so far it's it's worked. Now I'm just telling myself to create a world that I myself enjoy inhabiting and would like to have invent adventures in. And so that's that's really freed me up. Yeah, that sounds that's that's amazing. Sophia, thanks for thanks for sharing. So I think my process is quite different from yours. And I think that's that's the interesting thing about these like these discussions is that every author has a slightly different process of working. You know, I think the commitment I make with myself is that I treat it as a job, you know, so I write every day. And I can't I don't let myself off the hook that I have to write whatever it is, like three hours every day. And there have been days where I'm like, OK, you're not going to write. So you're going to sit on this chair and not do anything else for three hours. The sooner or later you land up. You literally have nothing else to do. So I switch off my Wi-Fi. I switch off my phone because it's too easy.  So that's kind of I think that's kind of my main. The one thing that I do every day, I have a little accountability group in the grotto when I'm really working on something that feels really hard. And I find myself not being able to keep going. I in the morning, and a lot of my group is actually online right now. I can see some of them are chatting. I put in this is what I'm going to work on, you know? And there's always a couple of like little emojis on Slack and they'll go up here or something. And then I come back and I said, I did it, you know? And it's such a small thing.  And then you come back and you say, you've done it. That accountability writers don't have that to anyone else. You know, there's no manager breathing down your neck or no one like giving you a raise at the end of the year. You know, so it's kind of on you. And then other than that, I have this little mantra which is going to sound so simplistic. It's like almost laughable. But it is like, if I want to be a writer, I actually have to write.  So that's kind of my main routine.  And then I'll stop for a couple of weeks. And then when I revise, I try to revise. I think I read a book somewhere, and I will not remember which one, where it says that three kinds of revision, one of them is chronological. And that's the most complicated where you're going every page and you change everything.  And then the other one is big to small, which is the one I follow. It's like, okay, this plot point is just not working.  And then I go through the whole novel editing that. And then it kind of, it's actually goes really fast because the biggest one is the hardest work.   And then I have some friends read it. Usually I have more than one person read it because otherwise you get too married to one person's opinion. I like that. I like all those ideas. Teri? Teri, what's your process? Yeah, well, I like what Sophia said about mystery as kind of a built-in plot in a way. Yeah, I believe that also. This particular book, I started many years ago and I was working full time. And so I was kind of just, I didn't really have a lot of time to write. I did try to write every day, but I didn't always have a lot of time. But it was kind of similar to the pandemic in that it was really hard to carry on the threads of a long-term project. So I found that it was easier for me to work on poems or short stories. And this book, of course, is a series of length stories. And but each of the stories, as I mentioned before, is kind of constructed as someone of a mini mystery in that there's a problem to be solved. Nobody gets killed, but there are issues that need to be resolved and there's a lot of immediacy because people are really struggling. And I found that over time, the characters would come back to me and they'd have another story to tell. And I felt like it came to a point a few years ago where they were kind of clamoring for their own book. I began to realize that the stories that I wrote all had a chronological sequence. There were some character development between stories. So each of the characters had their own threads and so it kind of grew organically in that way. So it's a little bit, you know, the different process for this book, but it was a process of discovery on my own part too, I guess. And now we're gonna hear next from you, Sophia, from your little, from your... Sure, I thought that I would just start with the very first pages of the book. That sounds amazing. That's what I'm gonna do too when it's about to hear. Okay, chapter one, Mistress Cherry, Oakland, California, 2023. Mistress Cherry had gone through her usual safety routine with the new client. She did not reveal the address of the dungeon until he called her no earlier than one hour before the designated appointment time. That was to ensure that he didn't just masturbate to the idea of having a session with a dominatrix, but actually showed up. Perspective clients might hope to waste her time, but Mistress Cherry had protocols to prevent her schedule being held hostage to their erections. Don't come late, she always told them once they'd settled on a time, but even more importantly, she regularly added, don't come early. Most of them didn't get the joke, but it amused her nonetheless. The trickiest part of any session was getting the money. That was the moment when there was a little rip in the fantasy's veneer, in the idea that she was all powerful and that this interaction was propelled by mutual longing. So it had to be handled with a great deal of care. It had to be done in a way that like a magician's flourish, misdirected the client's gaze from the power dynamic inherent in who was paying whom. So like always, Mistress Cherry had this client stripped to his underwear, revealing the women's lingerie she had directed him to wear, then kneel on the plush black carpet with his forehead on the floor and the tribute held aloft in his hands, in his outstretched palms. She would let him hold this position for a beat or two while without him knowing, she would snap a quick photo for what she thought of as insurance purposes. Then she would lay the end of her whip on his back gently and lazily glided in swirls, then lifted up and touch it down in a new place, eventually tracing it up the back of his neck or down to his buttocks. She smiled as the new client broke out in goose flesh as they always did. This ritual was one of the reasons she still required cash payment. It was hard to build a good scene around a Venmo transaction. After she took the money from his outstretched palms, she as always commanded him to crawl to the bathroom to take a shower. Many years ago, her mentor had drilled this into her head. Never let him see you count the money. You don't wanna do it in front of him, but make sure you do it, always count the money. To give herself plenty of time to count and to continue the act, her protocol prescribed that she hand the new client a timer, the old fashioned kind with a big dial that shows how much time is left and that actually ticks. I'm giving you eight minutes, she said.  She waited until she heard the shower turn on and then she began counting the money. Five crisp Benjamins, mistress Cherry smile. Her procedure had been refined over her many years of this work. Another dimension in which experience was an asset. She opened the wall safe concealed behind the iron cross and added the money to the growing pile. She had a few moments now to relax. Why had it surprised her so much to learn how many men of all ages wanted to be taken to task by a woman in her fifties? Perhaps because despite their abundance, advertising and TV rarely showed beautiful middle-aged and older women. But now she thought the increasing demand for her services made complete sense. She was older and she had some wrinkles, yes, but these men didn't want to have a baby with her. What they wanted was to feel safe within power confidently wielded. It doesn't hurt that she still looks great in the corset and fishnets and stiletto thigh high boots. A funny paradox it is, she thought.  Mistress Cherry's vision went blank as she crumpled onto the black carpet. Ooh, I did not see that coming. That's amazing, Sophia. That's great. That's so good. Thank you. Thank you. Where are we? I think we're, that's amazing. I'm still, I am completely joking out of our experience. I think we worked, that's amazing. I'm dying to read the last. I think we were going to talk about the different phases that we are each in and Terri, you were gonna maybe start out to solve. Okay. Yeah, so we're kind of starting from the back and working forward because of course, my novel was just published about a month ago. So I've been working through the marketing and promotional aspects of it. And I found that what's been interesting to me is that in writing the novel, you know, a long project like this, you get so immersed in the characters and you really understand, you know, I think I'd probably know, you know, I've read every word so many times if I was really pressed to, you know, if somebody held a gun on me, I could probably almost recite it. But the thing that's been interesting to me about the publicity aspect of it and also having gone through several really insightful interviews, you know, people asking me about the novel and about my writing process and so forth, is that it's given me a different perspective because I'm looking at it from the outside, which has been kind of an interesting process of discovery itself in that it gives me a different, you know, a different way of looking at things than I had when it was all inside my head, so to speak, or in my computer or whatever. But I think that's been the most interesting thing for me is the fun of kind of rediscovering it in a different way has been kind of fun. And then, Pia, you're in quite a bit of a different process at this point, right? Yeah, completely, quite different. And I think I'm many stages behind you. So I finished a novel and gone through the editing process and I signed with an agent. I think for me, what is very interesting about being a writer or the writing career is that for me, it's not my first career and I think that's true for each of us. This is not our first career. And I think having that gives me a lot of perspective, you know? In Hollywood, there's always this like person who decides to be a writer. They work for like maybe like five seconds and suddenly they're like a no-province-free show or like they're like jazzing about town flush with cash, you know? And so my last career was in PR.  And the first few years, you were still trying, you were looking for mentors, you were trying to figure it out. There were like setbacks.  So it's been really an interesting perspective for me to have that same set of rules for this career as a writer that the beginning is not necessarily going to be the easiest piece. And perhaps for me to feel successful or like have that Hollywood payback, maybe it will take a couple of decades, you know? So I feel like I am really committing to that longer life as the longer creative life. And I'm in it for the long haul, like however long it takes, you know? So right now, I signed with an agent who's given me amazing feedback. So I thought I was maybe close to being done but as I read her feedback, I realized like how great that feedback was. So I'm kind of rewriting the entire novel like taking a lot of things apart and reorganizing certain things. So it's kind of funny because sometimes I think I'm like almost worse off than when I started because now I'm like really deconstructing everything and I don't really fully, I'm not fully certain that I know how to put it back together. But that's just how it is. You know, gotta trust yourself. Worst case scenario, you'll go back to the beginning and like do it again, you know? Which is the way it is in any career. You don't know how to do every single thing, right? From the get-go and the only way of learning it is to actually be doing it, you know? What do you think, Sophia? Well, I was just thinking about, I think you are so lucky to have an agent that's taking such an active interest in your project. That's, I mean, I have an agent and since my memoir, and I don't think she gave me, I mean, she sold the book but I don't think she actually dug into the, I think that's a very good sign. I know it's hard to like actually have to do the work. No, but I love it too.  She, yeah. I just think that's very cool. And I'm excited to, I'm very excited to read it. And I hope everybody heard Terry's, the name of Terry's book, which is The Bridge on Beer River, right? Yes, that's right. Yeah. I have it already on order at Bookshop but I don't know if they're out but it's taking a long time to get here but I'm excited to read it. Yeah, well, so I'm in the kind of, I used to hate this phase of like the blank, I used to have fear of the blank page. So I, you know, I'm much more comfortable editing than reducing, which is I guess why that editor mind takes over for me. But we have this novelist group at the Writers Grotto and one of our members talked about how much she loved the phase I was in because like it was just- That was me. That was me, Cynthia. Was it you? Oh, I thought it was Lindsay, but maybe it was you and me. Okay, well, thank you because it really made me rethink it. It was like, yeah, what am I talking about? This is just the fun. I just get to have fun and I don't have to worry about, does anybody want to buy it? Does anybody, you know, do I have to get an agent and all that? And so that helped me a lot, Pia. Thank you so much. I've been really enjoying this part. I'm in the part where I'm like, I do research, I'm doing my first draft, I'm outlining, I've got the outline of the mystery piece but there's a lot of, you know, there's four main characters. They're all women in their 50s and 60s. Two of them went to college together but kind of had a falling out. Three of the four were Oakland cops together and my husband's a retired Oakland cop so I can pull a lot from that. But anyway, there's all this backstory and stuff and I'm doing a lot of research. I mean, I didn't know the stuff that Mistress Cherry was talking about just off the top of my head. I had to do a lot of research. It's not autobiographical. It's not autobiographical. Yeah, I read like several memoirs and some other blue stuff. But anyway, yeah, so it's super fun, you know? And like I say, I'm just, I am determined to, you know, whenever I get stuck, it's just like, just have fun with it. You know, I was a writer that wanted to like be a literary writer for a while but I think this is probably more my space, more the place I can flourish, so. Yeah, thanks for saying that. You know, I think that's kind of one of the benefits of being a writer. Like it's not gonna be the career that promotions and rewards and bonuses, but it's gonna be like a career where we can have fun, you know, like, so we can do what we wanna do. We can make things up. We can decide how a character is.  Exactly, yeah. And because, you know, it's a tough, it's a tough business. It's a tough business. I might as well like enjoy it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, I just wanted to throw out, you know, I totally agree. And I think that the, you know, I kind of fall back to Aristotle, I guess, but, you know, the real purpose of writing is to entertain, you know? And so, you know, by striving to entertain a reader, you're also kind of entertaining yourself. Of course, there's a lot of hard work that goes into it.  And I think that's what makes it fun. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Okay. Will? Yeah, so I wanted to ask, it sounds like each of us had other careers.  And I'd be curious, you know, Sophia, you know, how has that evolved for you? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I sort of have two hats I've worn career-wise. One is writing and kind of, so I've never been able to make lots of money like on my creative writing, but I've done a lot of like development writing or teach, I work with Stanford development writers and we do a series of workshops for them with a partner. And right now I'm doing some ghost writing that pays well. But I have this whole other side of my career which was actually more numbers oriented. I was in kind of do good finance. I was in mission oriented finance. So working with nonprofits and like other social benefit companies to co-ops and others to either give them loans, financing or just help with their financials. And yeah, I kind of went back and forth. So I started in that career and I, because I started that career at like out of college and I always wanted to be a writer but I had that idea that came from Hollywood. Like every time I started to write, it wasn't good enough and I assumed that meant I couldn't be a writer. So it took me a while to figure out that like anything else it's a skill and you can work at it. So for me it was when I had my first child I just like I actually left my job and I was taking care of my baby and I started writing actually helped a group start this website called literary mama. And so that gave me some time to write but of course I was also taking care of a small child and but that was then I had another child and in that phase is when I wrote my memoir. And then I wrote that YA novel I was telling you about and I actually got really demoralized with that project and I was trying to find like something that I could regularly publish and there was a lot of rejection and I ended up my kid wanted to go my older kid wanted to go to private school, private high school. And so I just was like, okay, I'm going back to work. I was like tired of no like sense of accomplishment.  And yeah, now I can both I have a little some writing gigs that pay me a little bit of money but mostly I can focus on my own writing. And I'm actually taking my younger child to college in like three days. So my son just commented, thanks mom. So yeah, I'm gonna have a little more time to really dig into this project, which I'm very excited about. That's cool. Yeah, do you want to share one of your something from your current work? Yes, yes. Okay, so I was gonna complete that part that yes, I too, like just while we were chatting I had to worked in PR and I worked in PR for 20 years like I said. And then now I write Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and I do PR Thursday and Friday because otherwise that's like, but the thing is I was pretty senior. So I don't have to work that many hours. I can ask for an hourly rate. That's pretty comfortable. But I couldn't have done that when I started. There's no way I could live on that income. So anyhow, that's the part of being an artist is that your artistic career is almost like a habit you have to pay for, you know? Anyway, on that note, so I actually printed out my piece. I'm gonna, if I look weird, I'm actually looking down at my piece. So the tentative title is All the Happy Families. It's a prologue. It was such a shame that it had come to this. If only there was another way, a way where she would see reason, but they had exhausted that option. Too much was at stake and time was running out. Beneath them the city gleamed in the background, even at this late hour, the lights of Market Street glowed like a living ribbon. Busy cars dashed from one stoplight to the next in a mad rush to fill unfillable lives. On the trail she chattered on, lively and joyful as always, full of the energy that might have made her such an incredible part now. Her brown eyes shone, her slender fingers waved in the air. She spoke of the future and all that they would do together, the places they would go, the things she dreamed of and how she would accomplish them. At no point did she acknowledge her errors, the mistakes she had made, the chaos she had created. That was her final flaw. That was her fatal flaw, her hubris, that she made everything about her. Through their walk, they had gotten closer and closer to the edge of the cliff where the land sliced up into a sheer drop with rocks ever so conveniently laying at the bottom and the ocean beyond. There was a thing about this city. There were so many hills pushing up against the sky with more jagged edges and friendly falls and one could remember. This one was a favorite, land's end. A place where the earth literally ended. Here, my love, drink this, it's getting colder. It was getting cold. The fog weaved closer, the farther up they went, damp tendrils of oblivion. Of course, no one was around. No one came here this time of the night. They had gone out the trail, the footprints tamping down the damp leaves that the coming rain would erase. Still, they climbed away from the tourist trail, a long legs easily keeping pace. She reached for the drink and took a long deep sip, the liquor and the honey masking the other tastes. A hot toddy like my daddy used to make. Drink up, it will keep us warm. And smiling, grimacing slightly at the bitter aftertaste, she took another swig. Her eyes wide open, happy to be here together. Self-absorbed as always, since she did not notice that she was the only one drinking. Chapter 1 Mount Tam in 10 minutes, Rima, he wants to see you. Mount Tam was a state-of-the-art conference room and a meeting there with Alex, a brand new big boss, was never a good thing. Plus, not that Alex would care, Rima had a conflict. She had promised a client that she would call her back to go over it yet again, the evolving strategy for the upcoming launch. Agh, Rima tied back. Mount Tam, huh? I don't think you have anything to worry about, Rima's I did ask, but I couldn't get an agenda. The response was immediate. Rima was always in trouble for not keeping enough professional distance with her team. And for Sally, the company admin to be watching out for her was likely some kind of a ding against Rima's leadership abilities. She had worked at Babo, a tech PR firm for eight years, rising the ranks from an assistant executive to where she was today. The only brown-skinned VP at the agency. This familiarity of a long tenure at the firm led to friendships and complications. It was five minutes past 10 when Rima got to the meeting room, but still she was the first person to arrive. The fog had cleared in the silver light of San Francisco shimmered across the room. The bay, archway, the bay bridge was a bright blue. Tiny people were crossing Market Street and an F train had paused the stoplight, waiting. As always, Rima took her second to be grateful for this constant beauty. Switching off the overhead lights, she noticed someone had left their paper mugs on the table, still half full of coffee. Without really thinking about it, Rima started to clear away the cup. She was at the trash can, balancing three mugs when Alex entered and saw unsmiling, holding his own steaming drink.  Take a seat. How are you? Fine, Rima smiled politely. Thank you for asking, you? Rima wondered if her smile was too warm, her tone too effusive. She wished she had not been caught clearing up, like the help. Alex did not answer. Instead, he sat his laptop down in front of him and looked at his screen. Love it. Yeah, very, very nice. Great start. I already feel for her. I already feel like pulled into her and those are great details like the, that he didn't answer. That is, that is, and the, also I loved a couple of your phrase, I actually wrote him down, damp tendrils of oblivion. That is very beautiful. And there was the description of the ribbon of lights, the beginnings also, it's really nice. Thank you. Very poetic, yeah. Thank you. I think that kind of brings us to the end of our little conversation and reading, right? Did... Well, I think we could take some questions. Yes. Did we get to hear what you did, Terry, besides, what was your other? Sure. So, I was, it was during the Vietnam War, I was a college dropout. Uh-huh, professional. Yeah, and then I, well, I ran out of money. So I had to drop out of college and I got a job as a messenger boy for, in the engineering department at Smith Corona. You ever remember Smith Corona typewriters? I do. And they had a spare drawing board and so I had some extra time and so I learned how to become a draftsman. And so they, after a while, they got another messenger boy and I became a draftsman. So then when my draft number, I had 37 in the draft lottery. So my draft number came up, I went in the CBs because I was a draftsman. And when I got out, of course, I wanted to study English, but I got a degree in creative writing, but of course there were, you know, no jobs. So I ended up going back to my original job.  And I went back to school for my PhD and I took a leave of absence but I still couldn't find a very decent teaching job then. So I ended up in Silicon Valley and I worked at some like seven or eight different startups and, you know, trying to write a little bit on the side. So when my spreadsheet finally balanced, I was able to quit. And I tell people, I kind of, you know, because I was writing a little bit here and there, I had this kind of dowry of unfinished stuff that I could work on. So my first novel and this novel and also my first poetry book are based a lot on things I started but never finished during the years that I was working. So my message to anyone is to keep going and don't give up, you know, similar to what you two did. Yeah. Thank you so much. We do have some questions. Well, we have one really nice question in the, it's a good one because it's gonna lead to some books and some great answers from you, I know. So our attendee would like to know if you could each, no more than five sentences, say why we should all read mysteries. Ooh. I can go first, it won't take me five sentences because it's fun. It's fun to read mysteries. They're like, they bring you into their roles and you can solve it and it's done and stays with you for a little bit longer. That's the main, that's why I read mysteries. Yeah, I would add to that a little bit. I think that, I think you can learn a lot from mysteries. You know, there's mysteries have a lot of different settings and a lot of different historical settings and stuff like that. So you learn about places and, you know, and they're a lot more fun than reading a history book. So in a way, you know, I look at mysteries as kind of a very pleasant way to learn more about things without subjecting myself to any, you know, to real study. I would add to that. I think they're both, they're really fun and also exactly, I mean, the kind of mysteries that I like, obviously you need to like them. And I just put a little pull out on my Instagram and it seemed like it was about three to one. People loved mysteries but not everybody does. So I mean, it's, I guess, you know, you can't force it but I find exactly what you're saying, Terri, like the kind of mysteries I like to read and that I wanna write are, I think of it as like you're going on a car ride and it's a fun car ride, right? But it's not only about the scenery and the car ride, it's also about the conversation and the whole experience.  What's gonna happen? Because that's just not what I like to read or what I wanna write because I want that space to like have relationships. And you know, I like Louise Penny. I don't, she's not a perfect writer by any means but there is, I've learned a tremendous amount about Quebec, about Quebec history and my son happens to go to McGill which was in Montreal. But I've learned a lot about history and in a very pleasant way, like you said, Terry. So that's good. Likewise, I've been reading the Anne Cleves series. I think I started during the pandemic and I'm really looking forward to her new book coming out. I think that's gonna come out over Labor Day. And it's set in the Shetlands. I don't think I even knew exactly where the Shetlands were. So I've kind of been reading those and it's also been very encouraging. The first, whatever, five books were okay, you know? Like she was obviously a very good writer. Like the plot was fantastic. But the last, I think after the fifth book as it went on, like the craft became fantastic. You know, the world evoked became just amazing. And you kind of, you read for the mystery but as you stay for the language, you know? So it's just like if the worlds brought together, it's just a world that I want to know more about. And then the Tina French novels. I think every single one of them has been just so good. Yeah, well, I like to read Donna Leon. You know, those are all set in Venice. Yeah. I don't know if anybody still reads Dick Francis. They're all about horse racing and jockeys. That's really a lot of fun. And I read a lot of Anne Perry. She has a couple of really good series that are set in Victorian England, if you like that era. So there's a lot of mysteries where, like I was saying, it's kind of an easy way to learn a little bit, or at least that can be your excuse. I'm gonna add for writers, Richard Osman, who is... What's up those books? Somebody asked in the chat if mysteries can be funny. Yes, they can be funny. And his are, I love them, of course, they're set in a retirement community, but they are again, mostly people in their 70s or in 80s. But his characters and they are hilarious and so endearing. I mean, I absolutely, it's a... What is it called? The Thursday. The Thursday murder club. Yeah, Thursday murder club. Those are really fun. And they're so nice. Each character is so compelling. Each of them has such a rich inner life, you know? Yeah, and they have very different voice that I think is awesome. Yeah, I'm thinking about it. I have four characters in my book, but yeah, the voice is incredible. I mean, he's really good. I love the cover, the cover design too. I think it's like, before that, all the murder mysteries used to be hazy, blue and mysterious fog.  And here's a pistol. Like, don't take it so seriously. I really like those books. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, there were some other questions in here. Oh, one of the books that I did for my research is called Pretty Baby. I'm pretty sure it's called Pretty Baby by Chris, something. But yeah, somebody wanted to know maybe some of the research, the memoirs I did, because that's one of them. It was very good. I thought it was really well written. There is an interesting question. Are mystery murders murder stories? Do all mysteries have to contain a murder? Well, let me jump in first, you know, because I was kind of advocating that that's not the case. But I think there's motifs in mystery, you know, discovery and realization that our characters go through, that plots go through, that don't necessarily have to have a murder. I think the murder, of course, is what drives the classical mysteries. But I think the egg of the Christie and some of those classical mystery writers have kind of embedded those motifs into the language of literature so that a lot of novels now use those ideas as part of their plots. I'm not sure how you all feel about that. No, I agree, I agree. And that even, you know, you get into this issue of genre, like is it in the genre? Like where will it be shelved? I don't know if it doesn't ever, but even in Louise Penny's book, I know there's one, but of course she's very, very successful on like the 10th one. There's somebody who's, they try to kill him, but they don't. And then he's in a coma and they're trying to figure something out. It's sort of a code they have to unravel. So I think even in, you know, maybe you shouldn't start with a mystery. If you want to write in the mystery genre, I wouldn't start without a murder, but I agree that the techniques are useful in any plot. And even if you could use them in a murder mystery. And I think Alexander McCall Smith books, sorry, did I interrupt you, Sophia? Oh, somebody just said in the chat about Sherlock Holmes, they're not all murder. Sorry, keep going, Pia. I'm trying to ignore chat, because I can't do it. I just turned it off, okay. It's so hard to like read and talk. I, what I was starting to say is that Alexander McCall Smith books, they're not a single murder in them, but they're like really well-fledged mysteries. I feel like almost like the old fashioned Nancy-Jewish mysteries, no? Yeah, like about jewels or about, you know, finding out who done it, but it's not necessarily...  Yeah, yeah. Secrets, yeah, secrets resolving a mystery. Sorry, the chat's popping up, so I'm like... Yeah, my husband loves Alexander McCall Smith, especially the number one ladies detective agency. Yeah. Because he doesn't, he reads a lot of the stuff, more police procedurals that I'm not so into. And I was like, what is it about this one? And he said he feels like they are treatises on how to be kind. Which I thought was interesting. That is really interesting. I think that you have answered the other question that I saw here, which was, you know, but you could tell us exactly what's on your nightstand at this moment, unless you're Mistress Cherry. We don't wanna know. No, no, I'm Mistress Cherry. I'm Mistress Cherry, I don't feel like that. But I will say, so I actually listened to it almost 90% of what I quote unquote read I listened to. I do audiobooks. And so I am actually listening to an Ann Perry right now, one of the Monk series. Yeah, the Libby app, I use the Libby app a lot. I have like in my queue, a Dennis Lahane, I have small mercies in and I have actually one that the, I have, but not, I don't only read mysteries. I have lessons in chemistry is like also. So I think that's a, that's a good, goodly number. What are you reading? I just finished Dear Edward by Anna Napolitano. And it's kind of funny because that's like, in a way it's a mystery, but it's kind of, I don't know if folks know about it. Anyhow, I won't give away the plot, but so she, her next book, Hello Beautiful, that's the one that everyone's reading right now. That's like the it book, I guess. And I read that book and it's very, very good. But Dear Edward just was fantastic. The voice there was just so intimate and so kind. And like this terrible thing happens, but it doesn't like dictate everything about this person's life. I thought it was just really lovely. And then I did read Pineapple Street, which reminded me of like a more modern Austin, which felt like, you know, I can see why everyone's so fascinated by it. But in both these books, nothing really happens per se, but they're written very well. So it just goes to show like, how many different kinds of wonderful books there are in the world, you know? Yeah, I'm currently reading Michael Connolly. No, I've read almost all of them. I think he writes faster than I can read, but I've been trying to catch up. Yeah, and I just finished reading A Gentleman in Moscow. I found that to be wonderful. It's just a really interesting bridge novel. It almost feels like, in some ways, it's quasi-Victorian or modern literature, but it's also very contemporary. So, so that's... And I'll have on my list of things to read. That's actually literally on my nightstand, is Dominic Limbs. Yes. All the right notes. Yes. I read that, it's great. Oh my God, I'm like dying to read it. You know, I'm just reading for... My son, my husband are gonna be away, so I'm gonna be reading it then, so that's fantastic. And then my friend, Ilana Debar, wrote a kind of mystery called Shaken Loose, which is a mystery set in hell. So I'm looking forward to reading that. It's called Shaken Loose by Ilana Debar. So... And I... I've made a few choices. I'm waiting for the bridge on Beer River, which is late to a little bit from Bookshop, but yeah. That's great, everyone. And actually Dominic's in the audience and says, thanks, thank you. There was a question early on too, I believe it was you, Pia, that were talking about like, why isn't there representation in books and TV? And, you know, it's weird. And the person asked, why isn't there? Like, why doesn't TV and networks know that that's what people wanna watch now, you know? They don't want just a whitewashed version of everything. It's boring. It's changing, you know? I think it's changing, it's gonna change more, but like everything, it changes a little slowly. But I think like Dominic's book, it's a gay love story. Like, we're all like excited to read it, you know? Like, my book has a main character who's off color.  And I think we want to read these books. We wanna watch these stories. And I think between Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Bush, they're trying to put these books out there.  So I feel very hopeful. I think just because it hasn't happened so far doesn't mean it's not gonna happen, you know? We're the generation that's gonna see you in. That's a very pausey and nice out club, but. Well, I really love the richness of things that are coming out these days. And it's just wonderful, you know? Because we're getting exposed to so many different, you know, cultures and ways of seeing things. It's just, it's really mind-expanding, you know, in the best way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I look at, in television, it feels like I'm seeing it much more than we used to. So. Recognition. Yeah. And even expands, but. But I will say there is the, you know, I feel like this belt of like women in their 50s and 60s, that's changing too, but there was just a, you know, who's the woman, Gina Davis? League of their own. She has this whole center of studying the media and there's very few older women that, and most of them are sort of flat characters or they're not main characters. And so, I mean, given that we are actually the most powerful, I'll go into my soapbox for a second, in terms of buying power, we are the most powerful demographic. I'm hoping that will force things to change. And it does seem to be changing, but it's kind of slow. But you'll have my book at some point. You know, on that note, I don't know we are getting to the end of this, but I just wanted to say that one of the people who really inspired me was Alka Joshi, you know? She wrote The Hanna Artist and The Perfume of Paris and it always says about representation, it takes one person, you need to see one person out there in the world and they will inspire the rest of the people like that. And I, so Alka has a very similar career trajectory to me. She had worked in PR and marketing her whole life. She was close to retirement, she wrote a book and the book did well. Like it did almost like comically well, but you know, good for Alka. But it just gave me something, it's just an inspiration. You know, like the fact that she could write a book which is like where the main character is of color, like does a bunch of brave things. She hasn't had a full career before that and then had the courage to stop that and start something where, you know, the publishing industry is like not an example of where things move faster or success comes easily, you know? So the fact that someone was doing that was also very inspiring. So I think we just need more folks representation just across the every demographic, you know, to further folks to be inspiring. There's two more questions. Let's, the mystery novel is subtext of the news. How do you glean things and stick them to the man? I don't know if you're planning on sticking into the man that might be a little bit much, but how do you glean things? G-L-E-A, that's right. Mine doesn't stick it to anyone. It's just like someone dies and people care and then they solve it. Mine might. I don't know. Yeah, how do you do that? I don't, you know, play in your writing and the nice thing about fiction is, you know, you can make it up. So if I say, sounds like something interesting to be written there by the commenter. Yes. And one last question. When writing, do you establish what problems of the human condition or personal inner conflict will reveal? Or is it naturally low? Yeah, I can jump in on this.   But you all that stuff just kind of came out as I was, you know, working through the characters' lives and working through the stories. And, and I didn't have to consciously, or at least I didn't, you know, consciously, you know, plot to, you know, to put that stuff in, it just kind of organically became part of my story. I think that, you know, I've kind of thought about that question actually quite a lot myself. I think that I am interested in racial relations and immigration and microaggressions very often how people of color get treated in a professional setting. But I didn't want to write like a scolding, like I didn't want to write a diatribe around it, you know, like I wanted to write something that people would want to read, that was you could just take on a plane and like get through it and like, or just take to a beach and read, because that's the kind of books I read, like little, like, little bit life-hardy, like moves very fast, keeps you interested because you're interested. So I feel like a little bit like you, Teri, like I think that all those themes are there, but not necessary, but the lens is always they're trying to figure out how, like who done it, you know, but I think you wouldn't, I think as a writer we are, we do care, you know, we do care about the world. We do feel like we want to move the conversation forward or move the conversation in a different direction. We wouldn't want to be writers if you had nothing to say, you know. So I think we are all trying to move the needle just a little bit, but for me at least it's through the lens of something that people would pick up and it's just a little, maybe once in a while there's a little sharp little pinch of a needle and there's not someone hitting at the back of the head with a shovel, you know. Yeah, exactly.  Sophia. 100% with both of you. I mean, it's, I think it's been pretty clear that so I have was thinking about power issues and older women and already doing a social media project about the joy and power of older women. And I think you can tell from my first scene it's it's kind of embedded in there, but yeah, I guess I started thinking about like stereotypes and then ways of turning them on their head in ways that would be kind of funny like I like I hope I can write a scene.  That would be fun, you know, I think about stuff like that. So, or, you know, she's, she's doing kickboxing in her, in her, in her back in her basement at night and then she gets into some kind of interaction and she has to kick someone's butt that I think that's awesome. So that might work its way into, into the book if I can, if I can figure it out.  And then I try to put it in the book if it's not too forced, you know, so I guess that's how the, the issue gets in to the writing, but it's, it's in a way that's, I hope serves the story. Yeah, no, I agree. The story needs to come, you know, my feeling is that the story should come first. And, and a lot of these other things do get embedded in it, you know, because that's how we feel. But, but, you know, in the end we're really storytellers. Right. Thank you all. Appreciate you being here tonight and our audience. I also just wanted to say too that we have a lot of mystery author talks that we have archived on our YouTube channel. And most of them have been panels. So if you are a mystery lover, please check those out. And I'm going to throw it in the chat one more time. And tonight's authors definitely gave us a lot to read, which I always love that about writers. They also champion other writers. And so just one more time too, here's the link for tonight's document, which has all of this stuff in it.  I'm Anissa. And I want to thank you all for being here, Pia, Terry and Sophia, and the writers grotto always for champion and the author and the writer. And we will look forward to our next event coming up in September and following in October, and hopefully soon to have everyone in person. Thank you so much, everybody.


Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to another episode of condo insider. My name is Jane Sugimura and I'm your host for the show today. And today, you know, our topic today is hostility and discord at board meetings and how board members, you know, can deal with it. Hopefully I can give you some pointers.  I think civility is as has is being lost in these public meetings. You look at the board of education.  And I, you know, my, my board meeting, I mean, we had one a couple of months ago in a lot of people show I haven't know I, you know, right now I. Our building is a no pets building. And I had all these people show up owner show up to say, Why do we have all these dogs and a no pets building and so we, you know, the board had to deal with that issue. And now, all the boards in Hawaii are dealing with the budget.  It's probably not a big deal. But now we're in, you know, we're in not so good economic times. And we've got inflation. I heard from one of my property manager executives that, you know, he's consulting with boards and they're raising their maintenance fees 14 to 20%. So I can imagine that some of you are dealing with angry homeowners. And if you are like, like my, my association and maybe some other associations, you have maybe a budget committee. And, and, you know, we were all neighbors and I, I've been doing it for years. This year has been very contentious. Very, very contentious. And I don't know whether it's like I said, whether it's a blue moon or something that's in the food.  They're yelling and screaming and stamping their feet. And saying, I'm an owner and you know, you got to do it. You got to do this because I'm an owner and you owe it to me.  I'm an unpaid volunteer.   You know, to the people.  And, and I don't think that's better. And yes, it's not easy for board members to deal with this type of disruption.  And board members, you know, not, not only during budget season, but every time a board meets, it's making decisions. And when it makes a decision, it, you know, it has the board members have something called a fiduciary duty. This is a legal obligation. That is in 514 B. And in fact, it's an HRS 514 B dash 106. That provides that a board member shall owe a fiduciary duty to the association. And I'm, I'm, I'm repeating this emphasizes you owe it to the association. You don't owe it to your neighbor. You don't owe it to individual homeowners who are who live in your project now. And you don't, you know, you owe it to the entity, the association as a board member you're making decisions that will prevent harm to the association that includes the association and future owners.   But as a director of the fiduciary duty, you know, is kind of a hard concept to kind of to understand. And this is one, this, I have to admit that this is one of the toughest concepts of condominium association to both understand and implement. And if you're a board member, what this means is your fiduciary duty is to the association, not to an individual owner. Well, that means that, you know, you're protecting the owners as a whole. And that's what it means. You're protecting them as a whole. You're not protecting your neighbor next door, or the person who lives, you know, down the hall. What you're doing is you're protecting all of the owners. That means that from time to time, you're going to have to say no to a specific owner's request. A great example is when an owner asks for reimbursement or special treatment, that's not covered by the bylaws. And for example, if you have a loud or noisy project that's going on in your, you know, in your condominium, and an owner asks you for hotel room because it's too loud, and he can't sleep. Okay, you're not obligated under Hawaii law to provide that owner with a hotel room. And if you do provide that owner with hotel room, then everybody else who's bothered by the noise and the ruckus is going to ask for hotel room. And all of a sudden this project that the association is paying for the budget is going up because you're paying for all these hotel rooms for owners who are bothered by the noise and whatever. And so in order to carry out your fiduciary duty, what you're going to have to do is tell that owner who wants a hotel room because he can't stand the noise for the construction project that's going on in the property. You have to tell him no. Okay, so that's an easy one. Okay.  And so I can't stay here. And since I can't stay here, you guys have got to pay for a hotel to put me up. So what do you do then this is and if you're if you're and this is the standard answer, when you don't know, you have to call the associations general counsel the attorney. And the attorney will look at the facts and the law and your governing documents and provide you with an answer that way you can blame the attorney for the answer. And in a situation where you've got a medic, an owner with a medical problem. Maybe you have to do a reasonable accommodation because they have a disability that way. You know, if the attorney says, well, you have to do a reasonable accommodation because this owner has a disability. And so, so, so you do it for that person, but it's only because they have a disability. And it's a health and safety issue. Because if you don't get him out of there, he's going to become very ill. And so that's the difference between the guy who just can't sleep because of the noise. Okay, but you know, these things, I mean, you can't make the decision yourself. So when when you're caught, when one of these situations come up, the first thing you want to do is to call the association's attorney. So that the association's attorney can guide you in making a decision that's going to fulfill your fiduciary duty.  And that that no, no is called selective enforcement. In other words, the association has rules, and you are on the board of directors. And so even though you're not the person who's enforcing it usually delegate that to your management company, or to the security people who work for your condominium, but you know, you're the one who makes a decision to say yes, you can do it for this person, but you can't do it for that one. That's a big no no get you into a lot of trouble. It's called selective enforcement. And that means that you're not treating everybody the same. That's why the example that I gave you about the person who who didn't like the project construction project because he couldn't sleep. And the person who had asthma and was affected by the dust, so that he couldn't breathe. Those are two different, you know, scenarios. And so for one, you didn't give them the hotel room for the second one, maybe you did. Or maybe you put him in a hotel and you split the cost and say, Hey, you know, we'd like to help out and, and because we're doing this and because you have a health problem and we want to make a reasonable accommodation.  At least, you know, we're getting you out of the unhealthy situation.  And that's what the owners after a while, if you do that enough, they will come after you and say, Hey, you know, board member, you know, you're not treating as fairly, you know, you let so and so do this and that and when we asked, you said no. And so that's why, you know, you have to act consistently to avoid the selective enforcement issue, and, and to make sure that everybody is treated fairly. And, you know, with respect to, let's get back to the, the budget approval at the board meeting, which may be contentious for some of you. Okay. And, you know, and board members really have a hard job, because you have to live with your neighbors. And, you know, one of the decisions you make at the approval of the budget is what is the maintenance fees going to be for the coming year. And like I said, at the earlier part of the program, I had a property management company tell me that, you know, they're raising associate mean maintenance fees in a range of 14 to 20%. And you're saying, Well, why is that? Well, number one, inflation is between eight and 9%. Okay, let me go back. Your budget, you're talking about your budgets. Your budget is really two pieces. One is the operating budget. That's what you have to pay, but owners have to pay so that the association can turn on the lights every day. The electricity, the water, the sewer, the employees paying for the insurance, and the supplies for the pool, the supplies for the cleaning people, you know, paying your plumbers and electricians and security equipment, and paying for the inspections because you have to have annual fire inspections. And maybe you have to have a structural inspection because somebody found a crack. But anyway, your operating expenses pay the bill for what you have to use every day for one year. And that usually covered by inflation. So if inflation is going up eight or 9%, then you take your actual costs from last year and you raise them. But you know what your association is your management company does is it takes your expenses from the previous year, and it talks to the vendors, and many, many, many of you who live in high rise building with no fire cars know that the insurance went up. And it didn't go up by the inflation rate. I know ours went up 30%. And so we got hit with an increase of $45,000 last year. And I'm hearing that in some buildings, it went up over 50%. So that's over the inflation. Okay, so you know, so the inflation rate is basically the bottom line.  And if you have projects in the pipeline. Oh, and so that's your operating budget, the things that you do on a daily basis. And then, so that would be covered by your inflation costs or whatever it is. So now it's eight or 9%. So you have to put in stock, set money aside for reserves. Okay, those are the two points one is operating expenses the other one is reserves, and your reserves. And to give an example. The reserve law went came into effect in the early 1990s. And it came into effect because Maisie he wrote all who is now now our senator in Congress. What used to be head of the consumer protection committee in the Hawaii State House of Representatives. And she was a grousing to me that she had condominium people who bought into units, and they got hit with a $10,000 assessment this is in the early 90s. Okay. And you know that's because back then, there was no reserve law, there was no law that said, you have to put aside money every month, all owners in a condominium had to set aside money every month, so that you could pay for the big repairs like you know, fixing the swimming pool, painting the building every 10 years, which is about a million dollar job if you're a 30 story building. And now we have small repairs. And for those buildings that are over 30 years, we have pipe replacement, which costs millions of dollars. And how do you pay for that. You're not going to wait until all your pipes are failing. Now, we need $19 million. And how do you get it you do a special assessment. And you know, and the whole purpose of the reserve is so that you don't do a special assessment. You put money away every year, every month, and it's collected with the maintenance fees to take care of all of the components in your reserve. And how you do that is you get a reserve study person who is certified and qualified to do a reserve study, who comes to your building and looks at all your components, and it looks at your roof. Do you have spalling, do you have painting, what kind of equipment do you have you have heat pumps, you have air conditioning equipment, and how long is it useful life, and how much is it going to cost, and how much do you have to do, you know, this year, so that when it becomes when you have to have, you know, do the roof, you know, you have the money ready, so you don't have to do a special assessment.  She that if we didn't, you know, do it voluntarily, she was going to make a law, and she did. It's one of the toughest laws in the country. And after the Florida collapse, there were states all over the country that were looking at the Hawaii law budget and research because it's so strong. And they're starting to adopt that Florida didn't have one now they do. But anyway, what it does is it says that you got to set aside you got to collect you the association, you the board are responsible for collecting money from all of your owners.  And these are awesome and replacing your pipes now that older buildings have to do. And these are some of these are million dollar jobs in fact replacing and putting in fire sprinklers is probably multi million. I mean, Marco Polo in 2021 spent $5.4 million retrofitting their building with fire sprinklers. And so, you know, so this isn't cheap. And you're not going to be able to do it in one year. That's why you have to, you know, sock away a little bit, every, every month, so that you have that money, when you have to do those big expensive repairs that you know are going to happen. You know they're going to happen. And maybe, you know, if they happen sooner rather than later, at least you have money in the bank that you don't have to do a special assessment, because a special assessment is hard on your owners.  You know, so, so you don't want to go there. It's better to incrementally re increase the maintenance fees on a steady basis. You know, if you're going to go there, rather than keep your maintenance fees low, and when something bad happens, say, oh, sorry. Now I'm going to have to special assess you $10,000. And we're, and people are going to say where am I going to get the money.  And, and those of you who are, you know, have been on boards, maybe have heard of owners rising up and getting rid of, you know, removing boards. They get mad. They get angry.  Because you as a board member, like I said, have a duty fiduciary duty to the association. That means the entire entity. That means current owners and future owners. And like what happened in Florida, you, one of the primary duties of a board member, and it's in your governing documents, you're responsible for the repair and maintenance of your building, which means you make decisions. You got to make sure that money is there. And yeah, it's going to be hard. It's hard to economic times like now. And so you got to be ready to make those hard decisions. And you have to know that, you know, under the Hawaii revised statutes, as a board member, you have a fiduciary duty to make sure that there are sufficient funds in your reserves so that future owners do not have to be specially assessed to come up with extra money because you fail to take steps in previous years to increase maintenance fees so that there would be enough money. And that's the whole, and the reserve study is a planning tool. It's not, you know, something, it's not clairvoyant, it's not a magic document that says, ah, this is what you have to put away. Yes, it gives you a number as to what you should, it gives you an estimate, but that reserve study changes. And in economic, in times like now where they, you know, where the economy is, so what do you call it, it changes so quickly. You need to get the reserve study updated. In fact, all any of you, if you're using reserve studies that were done in 2020 and 2021, they're obsolete, their numbers are no good. Okay, so you need to do a new one for 2023. And, and, and, and, you know, that's a given if you're working off of those old numbers.  And it can't, you know, it's not useful as a planning tool, unless you use current numbers, because what a reserve study does is it makes a list of all your components, figures out what the useful life is, and how much it costs to replace it. And then they figure out how much you have to sock away every year, so that when it comes time to replace it, you will have the money. And so if the costs of goods go up, like it did between 21 and 22. That means that if you did the reserve study in 2021, those numbers are no good anymore.  Right. The interest rates, you know, went up. What was it inflation was maybe three or 4% in January of 2022 and now we're up to eight or 9% I mean, and it's so volatile. And now in today's paper I think there was a news where the, where the Wall Street, the markets are up over 1000 points. Because there's a report that the inflation is cooling. So now everything's coming down. So, you know, and, and, and, you know, so it is volatile. And, you know, for board members, this is you have to understand that this is a hard choice, but you need to think of the association, not your neighbor next door, not, you know, your best friend who lives down the hall. And your decisions have to be for the entire association for current owners for future owners, and to make sure that you got that pot of money set aside for your reserves, so that your building does not suffer. What happened in Florida when that building collapsed, and that building collapsed, because the owners and the board members didn't do what was necessary to maintain that building they knew that there were problems. They were told that there were they had a report, they had a report for eight years, that there were spalling problems structural problems, and nobody didn't love the board, you know, just before the collapse, try to raise money, and the owners would not approve the increase. And, and in fact, I think they did manage to pass something, because when the building collapsed, they were in the process of collecting this extra money, but it was too late.   And yes, it is a thankless job you are an unpaid volunteer we all know that, but you know you're doing something that's good for your building, and good for your owners, even though they might not think you're such a good guy right now. But you are doing it for their benefit. You have the information they don't have. And, you know, so you need to use that information to make the best decision for your association. And for those of you who continue to have a disruptive meetings for your owners, where it's not just for the budget, or maybe for something else. Please tune in next week, because I'm going to have as my guest, Rachel Glanstein, who's a professional parliamentarian, and she's the one that you would hire to come to your meetings. And she would, she would run the meetings and she she would make sure that those people who yell and scream to not disrupt your meeting that you the board will be able to finish your meeting and get your business done. But anyway, that's, that's another episode. And, and so I hope you will tune in next week to hear what she has to say. And I thank you so much for joining us today. For this episode of condo insider and condo insider is the show for people who live and work in condos. And so I hope we've been able to bring you some good information that you can use in your relationship with your condominium. And so thank you for tuning in. And please join us with other episodes, especially next week, when we have Rachel Glanstein. So a hollow, mahalo and aloha. Thank you. Mahalo.


He died two years ago, and it was the worst thing that's ever happened to our family We never recovered from it and honestly it felt like the light of our life had been taken within seconds There were just three of us left now my wife Sally Myself and our younger son James a family of four is like four limbs of a body Without a limb the body is never the same as it was before and it struggles to know how to function again Jonathan was 18. He was a clever kid with a love of libraries science and basketball He never really gave us any trouble and always had a way of making everyone ease up when he walked into a room Just a really personable kid. So when I found his body I knew the final verdict of suicide didn't make sense. He didn't leave a note People trying to suggest that maybe he was struggling at school But John was a straight-A kid and we never put pressure on him to even get A's all the time After his death the family fell apart None of us knew how to start speaking about the grief of his absence And I began to spend more and more time in the garage Pretending to fix things but really I was looking into strange and unexplained Suicides it wasn't until six months later that another kid in John's class one of his friends Sam was found dead by a parent's suicide that I began to spiral Something was happening in this town. It wasn't long before another of John's friends a girl named Lacy was found dead as well It took me over a year to find the courage But I finally went into his room seeing that closet was painful as hell, but I had to look I had to find out what was going on. I Looked everywhere between the clothes the top shelf Desperately hoping for some clue an hour later empty-handed. I got up I was about to close the door when I spotted it a small silver handle in the wooden floorboards I pushed back clothes to reveal what looked like a small wooden door within the floor We'd never built any such thing in the floors of this house Slowly I touched the handle. It was old. How had we missed this? I pulled it open slowly and it lifted with a protesting Creek. I grimaced and Slowly carefully looked down to see what was there What I found shook me right to my core. How had we missed this? There was a ladder that led down the kind you find in a manhole But what unnerved me was that it was so dark. I couldn't see how far down it led And the ladder was covered in bloody handprints I sat back. This shouldn't exist. How was this even possible? The whole seemed to completely ignore the rest of the house's architecture to exist John's room was right above the living room So logically speaking, this should have opened in the middle of the room And it didn't I swear to you right now in this moment that I'm a skeptic I don't believe in afterlives or past lives. I don't believe in ghosts or ghouls or anything like that Never have My first thought was to use my phone's torch to shine a light down there I did and I could see only as far as the ladder's fifth step The crimson of near fresh blood on each stair sickened me.  I looked down there for a moment and I swear to God I heard a growl. It wasn't loud. It was soft Low Like a warning I scrambled back from the hole heart-thudding and considered my options I didn't want to tell my wife and son yet But I also desperately wanted to know what was down there and how it was connected to my son For now, I shut the cover of the hole Instantly a feeling of relief flooded my body I took a step out of the closet and placed my hand against the frame to take a deep breath Heart pounding I left John's room I needed to think Back down in the garage, I considered what I was going to do I had work the next day and I didn't want to wait until after work to see what was down there Sally and James wouldn't be home for at least another three hours My wife had taken our younger son James to the dentist about some cavities After another moment, I took my toolbox out and remove the hammer, nails, the flashlight, and the matches just in case Then I took my backpack out of the car and emptied it on the work table Quickly and efficiently, I began to pack it, arguing with myself the entire time Finally, keeping the blood in mind, I put on a pair of gloves With some hesitation, I hoisted the backpack, took a long slow walk up the stairs I switched the light on in John's room Then I opened his closet I looked down to where I'd found the catch. It was definitely there. I hadn't made it up I opened it up and slowly with the flashlight on in my hand and grimacing slightly as the iron smell of blood hit me I began to take the ladder down one slow step at a time The iron smell got worse as I went down On the tenth or so step, I shone the flashlight around The air was thick with darkness and when I say thick, I mean imagine trying to drive your car through thick fog Only it's pitch black The light of the flashlight couldn't even make it more than three feet ahead of me or behind me I shone it downwards to see how many steps remain to the ladder and it stopped past five steps Clearly, there was a long way yet to go As I went further and farther down, careful not to lose my flashlight, I kept count 20 steps 30 40 It wasn't until I counted the 150th step that my feet finally touched something solid I shone the torch down to see a black substance on the floor I knelt to touch it It was like sand Black sand I coughed a little The smell down here was utterly rancid Old rotten blood. That's what it smelled of Still around me There was this pitch black fog that the light literally bounced off I couldn't see anything I heard a growl again But this time it was louder And then something shifted making the black fog ripple I froze Then very quietly Heart thudding I reached inside my backpack and looked for the hammer The growling got more intense with every shuffle I made And I stopped moving H-hello? I asked, feeling both foolish and afraid Who's there?  Who's there? I should have freaked out and legged it back up I didn't I don't know why I didn't I just stood there frozen Jonathan? I don't even know why or when I said it I guess I was so desperate for it to miraculously be him Jonathan? It mimicked again It seemed as though it was mocking me I could hear it shifting in the dark and still my feet wouldn't move The hair on the back of my neck stood up As ice cold air began to blow against my skin Then I realized that it wasn't air Air didn't change so rhythmically or periodically It was something breathing Right behind me Very slowly I turned to look My flashlight shone on the ground first And the first thing I saw was hands Bloody hands with ragged fingernails They seemed to be flat against the ground My hand shaking I slowly moved the flashlight up To see its arms then shoulders Soaked in blood It was then that I realized it had no head In panic I shone the flashlight in the things direction And I saw it in full A horribly dismembered woman Stitched back together all wrong Her legs were where her arm should be And her head Her head stitched on her upside down torso What made me run What finally made me take those steps up the ladder to at a time Was her face The milk white of her unseeing eyes And her wound of a mouth With far too many teeth As I raced up the ladder I thought I heard skittering under me Faster and faster I raced up And faster the skittering became I was terrified now Not knowing what would happen if the thing caught me My heart was thudding so hard I could barely hear anything else But I knew I knew I couldn't stop And if I did That thing would drag me to wherever it came from I literally threw myself out of the top of the hole And slammed the door shut as hard as I could A slam with force resounded on the other side Then another thud And another one It was trying to get out It was trying to get out I couldn't let it My heart slammed against my chest I put my full weight onto the door As the thudding continued It almost felt like whatever was knocking on the other side Had a hundred hands I grabbed my backpack Finally found my hammer And yanked out the nails from the pocket As soon as I did this The frenzy of hands stopped below me Everything was very quiet suddenly I took this as my opportunity I broke John's desk chair into wooden planks And used them to board the door up After I was satisfied I left the room I never wanted to go in there again A week later, at the anniversary of his death A letter from John arrived in the mail I remember every second of that day so clearly Even though I'd barely slept since my trip down the hole I was sitting and drinking my second cup of coffee after work For the last week I'd noticed I hadn't really stopped shaking And was very seriously considering selling the house But getting Sally to agree was proving difficult Without worrying her about the manhole Too many memories of John lived here for her The last time I asked We got into such an awful fight we didn't speak for two days I heard the mail and on autopilot Stood to go and get it I sifted through this idly Giving my brain something to do And then I nearly dropped the pack There, amongst the letters was clearly John's writing Addressed only to me With frenzied hands I opened the letter Hi, dad I know I'm probably the last person you'd be expecting to hear from I'm addressing this to the old house But, truthfully I hope you've all sold it And that this letter never reaches you If it does and you're reading this Then I hope it isn't too late already Dad, there's a door in the floor of my closet I need you to seal it up tightly And move away Do not open it Don't look in it Please About a year ago My friends and I went hiking on a Friday afternoon And it got so late That we took shelter in a cave from the rain When we woke up the next day We were all caught And one of us was missing Christina I'd ask if you remember her She was one of my best friends But you won't No one does I wanted to report her missing But Sam convinced us that we looked guilty So instead We went home And cleaned ourselves off And tried to forget about what happened We kept expecting someone to call us Or someone to call us Or someone to mention Chris was missing But to our surprise No one did Still My guilt was eating away at me But then something weird happened When we went back to school that Monday It was like other than the three of us No one remembered Christina anymore Her locker was another kid's locker No one in school even talked about her Even her parents Acted as though They only had one child Chris' sister Jess It was as though we'd made her up Two weeks later The doors appeared in our rooms For the last year Whatever is down there torments us It sits on my wall At night It hides under my bed I've tried to nail the door shut But it still gets out It looks like Chris I don't know how It looks like Chris I don't know how much more this I can take I feel like I'm going mad If you're reading this Then something has happened to me I'm sorry dad I know I let you down But please Seal the door Sell the house And get out Tell mom and James I love them Love Always John Did what John asked I sealed the door shut Much to my wife's dismay I sold the house But truly it was for the greater good We couldn't move on living like that Even without the door The memories of John attached to the house Were simply too painful Our new home Is in another state It's smaller and quieter James is happier here And so is Sally It's a long process for us And there are good days And bad days Sally had been nagging me To clean out the basement of the house Since we moved in So today I went into the basement And started moving the dusty old boxes out When I lifted the final box In the corner of the room I froze There Carved into the floor With a silver handle Just like the one in John's room And something Was knocking On the other side