Book Details for
Wrong Place, Wrong Time
When Tsara Adelman leaves her husband and two young children for a weekend to visit her estranged uncle, she little dreams he is holding several local children captive on his lavish estate. Mike Westbrook, father of one of the boys, kidnaps her to trade her life for the children’s. Soon Tsara and Mike are fleeing through New Hampshire’s mountain wilderness pursued by two rogue cops with murder on their minds.
Q&A with Wrong Place, Wrong Time author Tilia Klebenov Jacobs
The main character in Wrong Place, Wrong Time isn’t your typical leading lady. She’s a 43-year-old married Jewish woman with kids. Tell us more about Tsara.
In Tsara I hoped to create a smart, funny, tough Jewish woman who might conceivably live next door to me. This is because for the most part when I look at popular culture I don’t see women I recognize, certainly not when they have the gall to be over thirty-five or so; and I don’t see Jews I recognize. (Pop culture’s two main species of Jew are Woody Allen neurotics and Holocaust victims.) Action-adventure stories are full of exciting men, but darned few believable women. Yet in real life I know so many wonderful Jewish women! And wonderful women who aren’t Jewish! Why shouldn’t they have adventures too?
I think Tsara’s struggles and triumphs will appeal to women and men. She is an ordinary person who happens to be Jewish and sees the world through that lens—and that becomes a lifeline for her when she is thrust into extraordinary circumstances.
Wrong Place, Wrong Time doesn’t end when the action is over. It continues to show how Tsara grapples with the emotional and moral implications of her experience. What do you hope readers take away from her aftermath?
That we make choices about how we continue after life has dealt us a blow.
A big part of the reason I wrote Wrong Place, Wrong Time is that often I find the ending of an adventure story unsatisfying. Everything stops when the crime is solved, but I frequently wonder what happens afterwards. Where does the experience leave you emotionally? Spiritually? How does it affect your relationships? In most kidnapping stories, the woman who is kidnapped falls in love with her abductor. I once met a woman who was held hostage by a terrorist group, and she never once mentioned what a turn-on it was. So I wanted to take what is in some ways a very typical story—hunky guy abducts attractive woman—and play it differently, in a way that to me seems more true to life.
At the same time, I tried to make Tsara and Mike people who could have fallen in love with each other if they had met under less, shall we say, awkward circumstances. Because that has a lot to do with the choices they make after the crime is solved too.
How does Tsara’s Jewish faith come into play in the dilemmas she encounters throughout the book?
Again, this has to do with why I chose to write a Jewish protagonist. We very seldom see Jews in fiction making decisions based on Jewish principles and ethics. In real life, of course, people often make choices that are guided by the dictates of their faith. And the thing that many people often don’t realize is that Jewish ideas about morality are different from Christian ideas. Even though the conclusions we reach may very well be the same, Jews and Christians (and Muslims and others, for that matter) often take very different paths to arrive at their destinations.
When Tsara goes to her rabbi for help, she gets distinctly Jewish advice that helps her cope with her experiences in way that is both ethical and pragmatic. The guiding principle here is that being a Jewish adult means living an ethical life even when you don’t feel like it.
Of course, people of all faiths struggle with life and morality with the wisdom their culture gives them. Tsara is Jewish, so I explore that aspect of her personality as we see how she personally views the world through a Jewish lens, and copes with her experiences with the help of her tradition.
The fight scenes in Wrong Place, Wrong Time are based on your experience as a student in a women’s self-defense class. Why did you take part in the course, and what did you end up learning?
When I was a teenager, a speaker came to my high school and announced that a huge number of us girls (and a lower number of boys) would be assaulted at some point in our lives, and that when it happened we must not fight back because it would make the assailant angry and “escalate the violence.” It was a very damaging thing to hear as a young girl: it made me feel terrified and helpless. Fortunately, the message is false. Years later I found that in reality, women who fight back against an assailant have an excellent chance of getting away, even if they have no particular training. As for making the guy angry, anyone who is attacking you is already angry, so don’t worry about his feelings.
Shortly after college I took a women’s self-defense course called Model Mugging. (It has many chapters across the United States, some of which are called “Impact” instead.) Instructors taught us a few easy, reliable ways to fight, and when we were good enough they brought in a martial artist wearing sixty pounds of padded armor. He attacked us, and one by one we beat the snot out of him. It was full-force fighting, hitting as hard as we could against a guy who was role-playing a rapist, drugged-out sadist, mugger, etc. It was a huge rush, especially after having feared the assault predicted by that speaker so many years earlier.
More to the point, it is excellent self-defense in real life. Graduates of this course who have had the misfortune to be attacked in real life have defended themselves beautifully, often knocking the guy out in seconds. All of Tsara’s fights are Model Mugging fights—it was one of the few things I didn’t have to research!
As for what I learned, it is this: women need to know they can fight back, and that when they do they will often win.
How long did it take you to write Wrong Place, Wrong Time? And you first wrote it as a project for National Novel Writing Month?
Yes, I’d had the story knocking around in my head for some time and I decided to let it out. Several of my friends had done NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), so I put aside the nonfiction I’d been writing up till then and let my novel off the leash.
For those who are unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, it is an annual competition perhaps better described as a self-challenge to write a fifty thousand-word novel in the month of November. This approach really worked for me. I went hell for leather every day, and hit the 50K mark without breaking a sweat. (As I said, the story had been in my head for a long time! And I had meticulously outlined it before starting, so I never had to stop and wonder what the heck happened next.)
I wrote the first draft in seven weeks. At that point, much of it read like Nancy Drew on a very bad day. That never bothered me, though, because I figured now I had something to work with. I rewrote it endlessly.
You interviewed so many people – psychologists, FBI agents, law enforcement officers – for your book. Who was the most interesting to talk to?
The FBI agents were amazing. First off, they were ridiculously generous with their time and information. Before talking to them I knew as much about crime procedures as anyone else with a TV. By the end—well, I won’t call myself an expert, but I definitely had the inside scoop! And they were kind enough not to laugh at me, which must have been a strain.
As I talked to them, I realized that the stories I read and write as fiction are the way they live in real life. They actually have tackled the bad guys and rescued the hostages. They’ve planted bugs and tracking devices, delivered ransoms, outsmarted villains. They had a protocol for my every plot twist. And they do all this for you and me, ordinary people with ordinary lives who are protected by these agents and their colleagues without ever necessarily knowing it. It was pretty stunning.
How did you get involved with teaching the art of writing at prisons in Massachusetts, and what’s that experience like?
I got involved with prison education through a volunteer program that has been around since the 1970s. It was so rewarding that soon I left the organization to teach my own courses independently. Given my experience with National Novel Writing Month, I chose to create a course based on that model. Yes, it’s true—I teach NaNoWriMo Behind Bars!
The experience of teaching in prison is always a little surreal. The corrections officers (guards) and other staff are always thrilled to see me, because they genuinely value my contributions. Then they search me with a thoroughness that puts the TSA pat-down to shame. Once I’m in the classroom it’s a lot like any other classroom, except that the door has a window in it and an officer comes by to do a head count at least once. And sometimes I get little reminders of where I am, such as the time a student offered to get me an eraser—I had left mine at home—and was gone for almost twenty minutes. Upon her return she apologized sincerely, but explained that a guard had stopped her in the hallway and strip-searched her.
You might be interested to know that teaching in prison is the single best way to reduce future crimes. Study after study has borne that out, and it’s been backed by bleeding-heart liberals such as the Bureau of Prisons. Education of inmates cuts recidivism better than tougher laws, more cops, mandatory minimums, or bigger, badder prisons. It’s cheaper, too.
Of course, there’s a payoff for me, too. Whatever else these inmates may have done in their lives, they are the best students I have ever had because they are so eager to learn. If I give them a few tools—for example, showing them how a plot works, and how to outline their stories before starting—the results are spectacular. Many of them are talented, and all are grateful. Teachers pretty much live for that combination. I hope to continue my present work for many years.
Anything new you’re working on?
I’ve completed a novel called Second Helpings at the Serve You Right Café. It was inspired by a chance encounter I had with one of my former students after his incarceration, and it led me to ask myself the question, “At what point in the dating process do you tell someone you’re out on parole?”
In some ways the book is very different from Wrong Place, Wrong Time; in some ways it’s quite similar. I hope it has the same emotional pull that readers have told me they feel from my first novel. I learned so much about narrative craft while I was writing that book that I wanted to do a second one, essentially using all the tricks I wish I’d known the first time around. It’s really been fun.
Guest Post
“What
a great question!” I exclaimed.
I
was the honored guest of a book club that had adopted my novel, Wrong Place, Wrong Time. We were meeting in the living room of one of
the members, and I was surrounded by well over a dozen eager readers who loved
my book and wanted to know everything about it and me. (Summary:
I was in Writer Heaven.) We had
spent the evening in truly delightful style, discussing characters, plot, and
process, when one of the ladies leaned forward with a gleam in her eye and said,
“Okay. Who’s in the movie?”
Of
course I’d already cast the movie. In my
fantasies, which is by far the quickest and least expensive way to do such
things. Wrong Place, Wrong Time is a
hostage drama set primarily in the mountains of New Hampshire, and it has a lot
of movie elements: a hunky (anti)hero, a
beautiful leading lady, and some really bad
bad guys. As I was writing it I
visualized almost every scene, especially the action sequences; which may be
why many readers have told me they instantly imagine it as a film.
So who indeed is in the (fantasy) movie
(of my waking dreams)?
The male protagonist, Mike, is a
former Marine with a criminal record. He
kidnaps a woman in a misguided bid to save his six-year-old son from one of my
really bad bad guys. Whoever plays him
has to be more than just hunky (though that is a prerequisite). We have to
believe this man would risk everything for his little boy, so Mike has to be
vulnerable as well as tough; and he has to be intelligent. Furthermore, he needs a sense of humor,
partly because that’s something he likes about the female protagonist. (More on her later.)
Alas, Burt Lancaster is unavailable
due to a slight case of dead. I toyed
with the idea of Hugh Jackman, who in many ways fits the bill quite nicely; but
in the end I went with Chris Evans. He has
all the necessary qualities. He is an
action hero with brains and heart, meaning not only that he is a joy to watch
in stunts and fight scenes, but we also believe that he is a complete human being
and not a cardboard cutout. In the hands
of a less competent actor, Captain America would have been a joke. The way Evans plays him, he’s a wounded
warrior clinging to his sense of right in a world gone horribly wrong. And that’s Mike.
Tsara is my female protagonist. She’s a fortyish, pretty, happily married
mother of two young kids, and in many ways has to project a Woman Next Door
vibe. She’s also smart, tough, and
funny. When the going gets tough, she’s
not afraid to let fly with fists or her even more deadly sarcasm. I think she’d be a blast to play. In fact, I have actress friends who are
begging for the role, and as soon as I become a Hollywood mogul I may have to
bow to their demands. In the meantime, however, here’s what I came up with:
My first thought was Diane Lane, for
her elegance and her obvious intelligence.
In addition to being physically lovely, she has a thoughtful quality
that would go well with Tsara’s temperament.
I also gave serious consideration to
Amy Adams, who can do anything. She is
great in dramatic roles such as Sydney Prosser in American Hustle; she can play a quirky but ordinary person, as she
did in Julie and Julia; and she has
the funny chops to handle Tsara’s sense of humor. Check out Enchanted
and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian for some
serious humor.
But ultimately I think the role goes
to my husband’s choice, Naomi Watts. He
points out that she has the look—Tsara is blonde and petite—and furthermore, Watts
clearly isn’t afraid to get mucked up for a role. Since Tsara spends much of the first half of
the book being cold, wet, miserable, and on the run, we definitely need someone
who can delve into that aspect of the story.
A clip from The Impossible
finally won me over: in the aftermath of
the 2005 tsunami, Watts’s character is bloody and terrified, but nothing
matters except saving her son. Which she
does. And that’s Tsara.
I just hope Amy and Diane don’t get
mad at me for passing them over. I have
a business to run, after all. Maybe I’ll
just send them copies of the book to soothe their hurt feelings.
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