Cold

This week in the Cold, we're going deep on war. Whether it's the focus or merely the backdrop of a story, war is riveting and writing about it presents unique challenges.

This week in the Cold, we're talking family lore and about the difference between happiness and meaning and how the two are interwoven in our lives.

This week in the Cold, we're celebrating the old fashioned cocktail hour. What we're really paying tribute to, however, is not the drink - you can have a mocktail, a bowl of fries, anything that tickles your fancy - it's a designated hour to connect, tell stories, laugh...be a family or community.

This week in the Cold, we're talking about how to create a character you'd fall on your sword for, rip off your clothes for and beg them to take you, and want as your very best friend in the world. The kind of character who aspires to greatness and stays with you long after you read THE END.

This week in the Cold, the title of the episode says it all. I've got ten really great reasons why men need to start reading fiction again. And I've got a link to a long list of great, high T novels for the guys out there to get started on. This is a diverse list of novels offered by my writer friends (indie, traditional, non-fiction and fiction), and by literary agents, designers, housewives, an advice columnist, corporate rats, a USMC General, a real estate agent, and even a Pulitzer Prize winner. The only thing they all have in common is fiction, me and Cold.

This week in the Cold, we talk about the necessity of high stakes in a story. How scenes of love and passion must mirror ones of violence and conflict in intensity and yes, sensuality, or else the story feels out of balance, and we shortchange the reader.

This week in the Cold, we're taking a deep dive into humor, particularly dark humor. We're discussing its limits - if there are any - its benefits, and the way humor is often perceived.

This week in the Cold, we address this the very issue of men and their tentative, at times contentious, and most of all secretive relationship to romance. I also have some surprises for you, and you're going to have to listen to find out about them.

This week in the Cold, we talk about the observers among us; those who never quite feel like they fit in. Outliers used to be a small, self-identified group of people, but increasingly, at least according to multiple media articles and my therapist friends, more and more people are turning inward.

This week in the Cold we're embarking on a retrospective of one of the most epic stories of our lives...that of raising a family. The ups and downs, the suspense, the plot twists and turns, the page-turning madness, the beauty, the meaning, the joy. It's all here!

On this last day of the year, we're talking New Year's resolutions here in the Cold. Not the usual ones - giving up chocolate, blah, blah, blah - but the kinds of game-changers that have a lasting impact on our lives.

In honor of the coming holidays, we're doing something a little different in the Cold. This week's listening experience is more like a song. It’s certainly inspired by a song; one I’m sure you know. You’re welcome to do your best to sing along to the tune of the Twelve Days of Christmas (or you can read the written version by following the link to my blog below). You can rap it, if you prefer. Doesn’t matter…as long as you take it into your heart. Maybe if it stays there over not just these next twelve days, but twelve months, you’ll find the spirit of these words and their concurrent offerings will accrue.

This week in the Cold we talk about the architecture of the soul and the spirit. We're being both literal and metaphorical here, and no, we're not being pompous - swear. This makes for a great start to the holiday season!

This week in the Cold, we talk about how to facilitate and maintain the momentum of creative breakthroughs. This is an active, deliberate process, my friends!

Every year around this time in the Cold, I like to make a comprehensive list of all the things for which I am grateful. It's more than a list, it's one part meditation, one part story. Because the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, how we frame our experiences, are every bit as important as the stories we consume and tell others.

This week in the Cold we talk about how even seasoned writers can experience creative stammers and what to do about them! This will be illuminating as hell.

This week in the Cold, I'm sharing with you a story about a one hundred- and two-year-old woman who I met as a teenager. She quite literally changed my life and my perspective, and may just do the same for you.

This week in the Cold, we talk about creators and how we feed our creativity. The life of an artist (and I use that term fairly broadly) can be reclusive, engrossing, and hugely rewarding. But when we feel blocked, or experience a creative stutter, those same inclinations towards solitude that serve us so well when the juices are flowing can turn on us, leave us feeling like we're floating alone in outer space. Well...no more! I've got some inspiration and ideas to help!

This week in the Cold, we tell some stories of the dead, as we walk through a few odd and notable cemeteries. It's a spooky, but mostly soulful contemplation that puts a different spin on the Halloween season.

This week in the Cold, we talk about the institutions and experiences that shape our lives, change our trajectories, and allow us to see ourselves anew. We get contemplative, sentimental, and philosophical...and yes, some great stories are told (ever been chased down a dark alley by a Servian gangster?). Don't even think about not joining in.

Heads up! My novel "Savage Island" is on sale on the following platforms ($.99 October 6-9)

https://books2read.com/u/bowBVR

This week in the COLD, we dive back into family lore. We explore estrangement from a parent, grief, and the unorthodox gift of a misfit relative. Please find a comfortable spot, pour yourself something warm, close your eyes and have a listen.

My BREATH series (books 1 and 2 will be on sale this weekend (Friday, the 29th and Saturday the 30th of September).

This week in the Cold, I tell you all about one of the biggest pieces of shite that I've not only ever come across, but actually had the audacity to translate and produce for the stage. And I say this with tremendous affection. I do this not to torture you, but to demonstrate why, sometimes, really bad stories hit a sweet spot in the greater culture and go on to phenomenal success.

This week in the Cold, we're talking about learning to listen to our muses, and subsequently, developing our true voices as writers. Will you write explicit sex into a love scene, or leave most of that to the reader's imagination? How far will you go with violence? When developing a magic system, will you make it subtle or spells-and-broomsticks obvious? Making these decisions is crucial to developing our styles and attracting readers who will keep coming back for more.

As promised, here is a short excerpt for what I'm working on, as I hone my voice for a Cold War detective noir series.

Bombay, India, 1959

A single bead of sweat trickled down Rodki Semyonov’s face, pooling at first in the saw-toothed scar on his cheek, then spilling over, carving a silvery path through the grime and soot that clung to his skin. The chill of the stone slab beneath him was welcome, even if it did little to cool him down. The Bombay heat was relentless, even this deep underground. He blinked up at the dripping ceiling, the sound echoing like a funeral dirge through the dimly lit chamber he found himself in. A place so abandoned that even the smells of mold and rust seemed faraway. But maybe that was more to do with Zoya.

“Rodki,” she said.

Hers was a cold soprano of a voice, made for a woman who was born to wear black velvet, but never did. And it had haunted his dreams for two long years.

Zoya leaned over him, blotting his face with a damp towel, letting her fiery hair brush his temples. “You’re a long way from Mother Russia.”

NO IDEA WHERE TO TAKE THIS YET. Likely, it’ll end in passion or death. Maybe both

This week in the Cold, I give you the skinny about what it's been like to renovate a nearly two-hundred-year-old house over the course of almost twenty years, and how this process mirrors the creative process. Particularly the process of conceiving and writing a novel or series. If you love adventure, you won't want to miss it.

This week on Cold, we talk about absorbing and interpreting our very own surroundings as part of our stories. We delve into my experience as a northerner who has now lived most of her adult life in the south, and what it's like to view a place as an outsider, but eventually blend in and become something resembling a local.

This week in the Cold, we're stripping off our clothes and laying in the heat. We're scratching our mosquito bites with complete abandon, bathing in any body of water that is not a bathtub, singing out loud and chewing on onion grass. Join us and leave your favorite summer stories and activities in the comments!

This week in the Cold, we're celebrating summer with my own updated story of the country mouse and city mouse. This one is complete with teenage girls, bugs and snakes, visits to The Met, ghosts, Civil War battlefields, and even the cast of "Hamilton." You won't want to miss it!

This week in the Cold, we talk about the artist Mirna Pavlovic's obsession with grand, abandoned places and how her vision corresponds with a writer's (at least this writer's) exploration of damaged characters plagued by broken dreams, violence, and lost love. We also talk about abandoned stories and why it's important to revisit them. Please have a listen.

This week in the Cold, we're celebrating American Independence Day by talking about family lore and the impact it has on our lives as citizens and creators. My own family's harrowing American story has informed my outlook on love, parenting, speech, and civic responsibility. The incredible tales I grew up hearing around our family dinner table - including our "coming to America" accounts - made my becoming a writer inevitable, even when other careers might have been less competitive and more lucrative. So, light a sparkler and join us!

This week in the Cold, we're celebrating Father's Day by talking about what it takes to make a man - both in fiction and in the Homeric journey of parenting. And yes, they overlap big time - at least for this parent and fiction writer.

If you're enjoying Cold, please remember to give us a follow and leave a starred review. It means a lot.

This week in the Cold, we're pouring ourselves a whiskey, lighting up a smoke, and slipping into the wonderful, seedy, stylish, dark, and darkly funny world of Noir!

This week in the Cold we're talking about really makes up the creative life, picking apart the actual bones of creativity, and the foundation upon which wild notions and beautiful things are built.

BREATH (Book 1 of the BREATH series) is available free for download this week only!

Get it while it's Cold!

This week in the Cold, we're talking about the difficulties inherent in taking a fresh, cold eye to your own work. In making your metaphors original, lyrical, and true, and turning the everyday into the fascinating, even magical. In essence, this involves approaching our work like a scientist and asking the very questions of ourselves that would produce counterintuitive answers full of wonder and awe. I'm also soliciting your opinions, my fellow scientists and creators, so allow me to take of your minds, if you will.

This week in the Cold, we're going all in on the Cold War! I've been immersing myself in Cold War art, photography and aesthetics as I've been writing a new, episodic Cold War noir thriller set in Moscow, Berlin, and Bombay in the late 1950s and it's been a blast! And I'm so happy to take you through some of my favorite Cold War memories and experiences!

This week in the Cold, we talk about how the stories we create and consume allow us to explore our deepest darkest fears. Listen...IF YOU DARE!

This week in the Cold, we're not only talking about how our food experiences affect our lives, but how they make their way into the stories we create (or merely enjoy). Just for fun, I'm leaving you with a very ethnic Eastern European recipe that my people love. It may seem weird and little outside of your comfort zone, but that's the point, so give it a shot. And don't forget to let me know what you think.

ROASTED BEEF TONGUE WITH ANCHOVY BUTTER

1 fresh beef tongue, boiled and skinned (simmer tongue in salted water for 3 to 4 hours)

1/4 pound butter

6 anchovies, mashed

1 medium onion, finely chopped

1/2 teaspoon lemon juice

1 cup beef stock

1 cup bread crumbs

Preheat over to 350 degrees.

Cream half the butter with mashed anchovies and spread over cooked tongue. In a large pot, brown onion in the remaining butter, add meat and brown that a little, too. Pour in 1/2 cup beef stock. Roast in oven for about 1 hour or until tongue is good and brown on both sides. Sprinkle with lemon juice and bread crumbs. Add remaining stock and bake until bread crumbs are golden brown. Serves 6.

This week in The Cold, we are diving into our most primal selves. I think it is nearly impossible to overestimate the role of ritual and faith in how we see the world - in the stories we consume, we tell ourselves, and we tell others. This is as true of the atheist as it is the believer, because it is the way human beings have made sense of the world since the dawn of time. We see it in every fiction genre, every archetype, and it's fascinating to contemplate.

Doesn't it seem like almost everyone knows someone who they believe was or is a spy? That's why this week in The Cold, we're talking about spies and the spy genre. I've got my stories and I'm telling them!

This week in the Cold, we talk about how externals - a new environment, the music we listen to - influence the story-making process. In my own experience, moving to a rural part of the country, after having been a city-dweller all my life, and discovering country music, has had a deep and profound impact in how I tell a story and create a character.

This week in the Cold, I tell a great vacation romance story and we ponder how deeply well told, important stories impact our lives. How they help us make sense of our emotions, organize our thoughts, and inspire the stories we write and create, or merely fantasize about.

This week in the Cold, we go demonic and talk about all manner of community lore, but especially about the real events that inspired the classic novel and 1973 film, "The Exorcist." This is a deep dive into how non-fiction becomes lore, which turns into fiction that spreads like wildfire! 

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://victoriadougherty.wordpress.com/2023/02/24/go-to-st-louis/

This week in the Cold, we're tearing our eyes away from our lovers and giving some much-needed attention to the other love story in our lives - the one we experience with our communities.

This week in the Cold, we talk about the structural similarities between popular fictional love stories and our own real-life love stories. According to readers, how a pair of lovers meet and come to be together is critical to their enjoyment of a story and features prominently in their continued interest in what happens to those characters. According to the most extensive research on long term relationships like marriage, how we fall in love - the story of us - is probably the most important factor determining whether or not that relationship will last. Powerful stuff you don't want to miss.

This week in the Cold, we're talking about the art and purpose of conversation.  Not just any conversation, but the kind that allows for nuance, true insights, a real connection. As a fiction writer, my greatest tool is observation. To be able to capture the essence of a character and do it generously is what makes for a good story, as far as I'm concerned. Something that feels light on the page and sticks with you. Having conversations with people - even when they are very different from me and hold opposing views - is what enables that.

That's why I also want to offer you what I think is a long, meandering, complex and wonderful conversation. It's between me and my friend, Ricardo Lopes, aka The Dissenter, and happened on his podcast of the same name.

This week in the Cold, we talk about the thrill inherent in doing our absolute best. How the pursuit of excellence is a noble exercise; especially when we’re able to separate the pursuit from the actual outcome. 

www.victoriadoughertybooks.com