The Writer's Diet

Lois Winston (Guest Blogger)

Losing weight is one of the top New Year’s resolutions. It’s also one of the top New Year’s resolutions broken. As writers, we do a lot of sitting at our computers.

We also eat a lot of chocolate and drink a lot of wine to soothe us through those inevitable rejections and harsh reviews. The result? Spreading butts.

There’s not much I can offer you in the way of advice to keep your butts from spreading, other than to tell you to eat right and exercise (how often have you heard that?) However, we writers have more to worry about than bloated bellies. We also have to keep our manuscripts from getting fat. And that’s something I can help you with. Today I’d like to present my 10 Step Diet for Reducing Bloated Manuscripts. It won’t help you shed those holiday pounds you packed on, but it will, if followed, tighten your writing.

STEP ONE: Reread your manuscript. Is every scene essential to the plot or the goals, motivations, and conflicts of your characters? If not, no matter how much you love what you wrote, ax the scene. Each scene must serve a purpose. No purpose? No scene.

STEP TWO: Repeat STEP ONE for all dialogue. If the dialogue is nothing but chit-chat, kill it.

STEP THREE: Do a search of “ly” words. You don’t have to omit all adverbs, but wherever possible, substitute a more active, descriptive verb to replace your existing verb and the adverb that modifies it.

STEP FOUR: Instead of using many adjectives to describe a noun, use one all-encompassing adjective or a more descriptive noun. If certain information isn’t necessary to your story, omit it.

STEP FIVE: Say it once, then move on. It’s not necessary to repeat an idea or image in different words in the next sentence, the next paragraph, or on the next page. You don’t need to beat your reader over the head. She’s intelligent enough to “get it” the first time she reads it.

STEP SIX: Identify needless words and eliminate them. Every writer has at least one or two pet word she overuses.

STEP SEVEN: Avoid laundry list descriptions by substituting more descriptive nouns and adjectives.

STEP EIGHT: Do a search for was. Wherever it’s linked with an ing verb, omit the was and change the tense of the verb.

STEP NINE: Choose more descriptive verbs and omit the additional phrases that enhance the verb.

STEP TEN: Omit extraneous tag lines, and let the characters’ words and actions convey their emotions. If it’s obvious which character is speaking, a tag line is unnecessary.

NOTE: The above word diet is part of a healthy writing style and recommended for all authors, whether or not they need to shed 20,000 words from their manuscripts.

So what do you think? As a writer, is this a diet you can stick to? As a reader, how do feel when you come across bloated prose?

Post a comment to win a copy of Death By Killer Mop Doll. The winner will be announced on Poe’s Deadly Daughters on Monday morning.

Lois Winston is the author of the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries published by Midnight Ink. Website: http://www.loiswinston.com

Year's End

by Sheila Connolly

As usual, I still haven't sent out my holiday cards. Note that I don't specify which holiday I mean. Maybe I'll try for St. Brigid's Day (Imbolc or Imbolg), or St Brigid’s Day, Irish Lá Fhéile Bríde,) an Irish festival, most commonly celebrated on 1 or 2 February. Brigid is the female equivalent of St. Patrick in Ireland. Her day celebrates the beginning of spring, when the ewes are about to give birth. (You may recognize St. Brigid's cross, which is placed at the entrance of a home to ward off evil.)

I can get these done in the next month, can't I? I like to send (real, physical) cards, complete with an annual newsletter, even though I know the latter is the butt of many jokes. "Yes, Jake is looking forward to his release from prison, while Janie has found a cure for cancer, which she has been testing on our (late) gerbils." I've been on the receiving end of my share.

But I think it's still a good thing to try to boil down what you think was important from the year that's ending. Admittedly that that may not be the same as what you believe other people (dear or distant) will want to know about you and your loved ones. Sure, we all try to clean up our image for the general public, but a lot of the people I still send cards to go back years, even decades (at least one high school pal, and several from college), and they've been through thick and thin with me. They deserve an honest summary.

So, 2011 … Well, I didn't see the broken ankle coming, and I might have chosen to skip that, except that in a true writerly manner I milked the experience for all I could, and, yes, there will be a broken bone in the Irish book that's a-coming in a year or so. I was also obscurely pleased to find that the hospital where I spent a few days is also the site of the Cork County morgue, which is where autopsies are performed. Useful to know.

Fractures aside, Ireland of course was lovely, as always. It's always a pleasure to see it free of tourists (hey, I'm not a tourist!), and people are happy to talk to you. We were there during the last Irish Parliamentary elections, and it was fascinating to see how different they were from the U.S. version (of those, the less said, the better). I even collected pictures of campaign posters in Dublin.

I was thrilled when my publisher renewed not one but both of my ongoing series (which surprised even my agent). I now have a schedule that extends out for years, assuming the publishing industry survives in some form. But I think it will, despite the upheavals and growing pains going on at the moment. People still want the words, whatever form they take. Let us all hope that authors gain a little more control over their own works, and publishers recognize the fairness of that.

We older folks (my husband and I) are more and more subject to the creeping ailments of ageing—aches and pains, petty afflictions that can drive you nuts, like dry eye and fungus in the ear (what, you haven't had that yet? Just wait!). I now understand what all those cheesy commercials are about (well, except for the ones with the two bathtubs...).

Our lovely daughter, with an honors degree from an excellent college, still doesn't know what she wants to do with her life, although she's pretty sure it doesn't involve retail sales. She's currently planning to take some time off and indulge in a Wanderjahr, visiting friends and seeing the sights. She's been good about saving money, so she can afford it. I have to admit I have no words of wisdom for what a bright young person should do in today's economy—it seems like all the rules we grew up with no longer apply. So I can't exactly disapprove of her taking off and having some fun, while she's still young and unencumbered. Go forth and build some happy memories!

I could write this holiday letter to include nothing but complaints, but I'm definitely a glass half-full type of person, so I celebrate the good parts—and channel the bad parts into my writing!

MAY THE NEW YEAR BRING YOU ALL THAT YOU DESIRE!

When I Grow Up

Elizabeth Zelvin

Writer Patricia Harrington says she “was told once by a psychologist: Ask a woman what she wanted to be when she was nine years old, and for a boy what he wanted to be when he was twelve years old. There will be elements of that desire or avocation later in life.”

Pat herself is a professional grant writer and mystery writer. She uses the idea that childhood aspirations mirror in some way, if they don’t duplicate, what people do become to develop characters in her mysteries. She says she “asked an Episcopalian bishop what he wanted to be at twelve. He answered, ‘a baseball player, and to play second base.’” She thinks his status as a suffragan bishop (“an assistant or subordinate bishop of a diocese” according to thefreedictionary.com) echoes the childhood dream.

Pat says she asked a public housing tenant “what she wanted to be at nine, and she said, ‘a hooker’. Made me wonder....” In fact, I’m less shocked, however saddened, by that response, than many would be because of my years working with alcoholics and drug addicts who ran the socioeconomic gamut from homeless to rich and privileged. The premise did make me want to know more about what people wanted to be when they grew up. So I asked the question on Facebook. It turned out to be more popular than many of my posts, but most the responses it drew were not quite what I expected. In retrospect, I was hoping for discrepancy rather than correspondence, along the lines of “wanted to be an astronaut...became a lion tamer.”(Come to think of it, there is a common thread in that pair: a tolerance for high risk.)

Some of the kids’ ambitions were imaginative:

“An opera singer & surgeon. At the same time.”

“All I wanted was to be a teenager like the girl down the street who I thought looked just like Annette Funicello.”

“I wanted to meet Roy Rogers & Dale Evans and have them come to the Bronx with their horses.”

“I wanted to be Dallas QB Roger Staubach. The only thing we had in common was I had concussions too.”

From a woman: “I wanted to be President of the U.S. I’ve since regained my senses.”

“At 9: mother of 12 kids. At 13: truck driver.”

Sounds like this last woman also regained her senses. I can’t tell you what she does today, because all the information on her Facebook page is in Finnish, a language that is known for bearing no resemblance to any other language (except Hungarian and Estonian; Basque is the language with no living relatives at all).

Many of my Facebook friends are writers, along with mystery-loving librarians and other readers, and that probably skewed the results. But quite a number of the writers have wanted to be writers since childhood. Of course, in today’s economy and publishing climate, many of the writers have other jobs as well. Mystery author Vicki Lane, for example, wanted to be an archaeologist as a kid; besides teaching and writing, she’s been a farmer for the past 36 years. Digging in the dirt...digging in the dirt. Makes perfect sense to me.

I’m one of those who wanted to be a writer from well below the age of 9. Of course, my plan was to become a published novelist at 24, not at 64. But luckily, writing is an occupation in which ability is not confined to any particular age group. In a creative residency I participated in a few years ago, all the composers of postmodern music were in their early twenties, the visual artists mostly in their thirties; the writers ranged from 20 to 62.

Animal Forensics

Sandra Parshall

"Will I have to testify?"

Even thieves and murderers often have pets at home, and if they aren’t careful their beloved Fido or Fluffy can help send them to prison. Recent advances in DNA testing have made pet hair a valuable weapon in a prosecutor’s arsenal, and it’s being introduced in a growing number of court cases.

We’ve all heard that every criminal leaves something at a crime scene and takes something away. While dog or cat hair alone won’t lead police to a previously unknown perpetrator, it can clinch the case against someone who is suspected of a crime and can’t explain why his pet’s hair is at a murder scene or hair from the victim’s pet is on his clothing. The Denver, Colorado, district attorney’s website has a list of major cases in which nonhuman DNA, most often that of pets, has played a decisive role.

In a few instances where people have appealed convictions for crimes committed before the widespread use of DNA testing, the move has backfired because prosecutors were able to use new technology on old evidence – animal hair found at the crime scenes – and match it to the defendants’ pets. When Wayne Williams, the Atlanta child killer, appealed his conviction, prosecutors ordered tests on hairs found on his victims, and the tests revealed that the hairs came from Williams’s dog. His appeal was denied.

Forensic evidence has also become important in fighting crimes against animals, and some experts specialize in this branch of science. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the University of Florida have created the first veterinary forensic sciences program at a major university to train crime scene investigators to gather and evaluate evidence in crimes against animals. The ASPCA has its own forensic veterinarians, who examine and testify about ballistic, toxicology, and blood spatter evidence in abuse cases. The Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at the University of California at Davis has the largest database of domesticated animal DNA in the country, and each year its scientists examine evidence in up to 200 cases involving abuse of animals by humans, animal-on-animal attacks, animal attacks on humans, and other cases in which animal hair might yield clues.

In 2010, the ASPCA, in conjunction with several state SPCA organizations, broadened its campaign against illegal dogfighting by creating a national database of fighting dog DNA. Called Canine CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), the database will be maintained at UC-Davis and will contain samples from animals rescued from fighting operations. By identifying links between dogs, owners, breeders, and fighting sites, Canine CODIS can help law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. clamp down on a multi-million dollar criminal enterprise that kills and maims thousands of animals every year. I mention the database briefly in my latest mystery, Under the Dog Star. You can read more about it here. 
 
In short, the animals who share our lives now have their own branch of forensic science. Should we expect a new CSI television show focusing on animals? What do you think it might be called?

Stoking the Fires

Sharon Wildwind

In Norse mythology, the two weeks after winter solstice (this year December 22 to January 5) are when good and evil battle for control of the world. If the sun comes up on January 6th, good will have won for one more year. Hmm, anyone else notice the correspondence to January 6th being the 12th day of Christmas?

Jumping from mythology to science, remember the consequence of Newton’s first law? An object that is at rest will stay at rest unless an unbalanced force acts upon it. I don’t know about you, but I am at rest right now.

Not peaceful, serene, contemplative at rest. Too little sleep; too many shortbread cookies; too much schedule disruption; and too many dark, cold nights rest. In other words, exhausted, cranky, out of sorts, stopped cold, sunk in the slough of despair rest.

I hope I remembered to do all of those be-kind-to-myself banking the fires activities that I recommended in last week’s blog because I sure don’t have the energy to do them right now.

What I need most right now are some unbalanced forces—forces for good—to act on my behalf.

If you’ve ever stoked a banked fire, you know that you don’t simply set a huge log on the coals and walk away. You have to coax the fire out of hiding. You start by adding a few twigs and blowing on the coals. When the twigs catch, add some kindling. When the kindling catches, add small logs. Eventually you work up to a fire that’s big enough to warm the room and boil water for tea.

So here are some suggestions for stoking your banked artistic fire.

Between now and the full moon on January 9, plant something. Literally. The moon is waxing and the world is starting its tilt from solstice toward spring equinox. When the waxing moon and the waxing world coming together it’s a great time to push for a little more green in the world. Start an amaryllis bulb. Plant seeds. Repot and feed a tired plant that’s limping through the winter. I spent an hour Monday morning repotting and feeding all of the plants that I’m responsible for at work. Hey, I want good to win that good/evil battle. Every new growing thing is a vote for the good guys. If you think you have the world’s brownest thumb, ask a friend who gardens to foster a plant for you.

After all this dark and cold our bodies are so not ready to jump into that new year’s resolution of going to the gym every day. We have to start small. Stand up. Starting at your toes and working up the body, tighten all of your muscles. When you reach your shoulder muscles, raise your hands high above your head. Keep tightening muscles to your finger tips. Hold that arms up, every muscled tightened pose for five seconds. Beginning at your fingers relax. Keep relaxing the muscle groups all the way down to your toes. Take some deep breaths. Repeat this tense-relax-breath sequence at least 10 times a day. Park your car at the end of the parking lot and walk into the mall or your office. Get off the bus one stop early and walk a block. This is the pre-pre-warm up for cranking up the body again.

Find yourself a talisman, something that will focus all your good thoughts about your writing during the coming year. I was very fortunate to get one for Christmas. Here it is.

Just looking at it or holding it in my hands fills me with anticipation of the good things I might be able to do. I'm banking on the good guys winning one more time, and the sun coming up on January 6th.

Happy New Year everyone.

------------

Quote for the week

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary. ~Aaron Rose, director, producer, writer, independent curator, artist

On the 2nd Day of Christmas . . .

by Julia Buckley

Christmas is a wonderful and a beautiful time, but the day after Christmas is a restful escape. No packages to wrap, no items to remember to pack into the car, no stressing over the present that didn't arrive in time.

Today is a matter of quiet sorting through the rubble, permeated by gratitude for the gifts found within it. It's a day of remembering all of the funny things people said yesterday at the big family gathering, but also a day of facing the scale and promising to be good from here on in.

It's a day for reading the books you received as gifts, or watching those DVDs that someone thoughtfully selected.

Here the weather is mild and sunny, and we have more sunshine in our house--gifts and food and good feelings--to last for quite a while.

The thank-you card writing has begun, and I instructed my younger son that he could not even start on his Medieval Village made of Legos (possibly an all-break project) until he thought about the people who gave him things and jotted down his thank-yous in cards. I hope this art of thankfulness will not leave them when they leave home--it's such an important thing.

I'm writing my cards, too, and realizing that even this is a pleasurable part of my break--because in reflecting on what I appreciate about people, I rediscover gifts I had taken for granted.

I hope you're all enjoying the 2nd day of Christmas in your own ways.


Happy Boxing Day to all!

Medieval Mince Pie

This holiday season I went in search of an English medieval minced pie recipe. It seems there is no definitive recipe for this. I imagine that with most recipes of this kind, it involved whatever the cook had on hand. But the original medieval recipes included meat--actual minced meat--in their recipes. Was this a main course or was it dessert--or both? Well, it's certainly hearty. I took a combination of recipes and ingredients from multiple sources. I hope you like the result. (This is my pie to the left)

Medieval Mince Pie

1 lb boiled beef, lean, and pulled apart into fine strings (I made the mistake of not boiling it long enough, so that my beef was chunky. This will take a few hours, or all day in a crock pot.)

4 tart green apples, seeded and cut into bite-sized cubes (I'm not certain that original recipes contained apples, but apples go back a long way in minced pie recipes and it is likely so go ahead and add them.)

1/4 lb or more suet (I just asked my butcher for 1/4 lb of beef fat, which he gave me for free. Cut it into small pieces and throw them in your food processor. Process to fine granules.)

1 box seedless raisins

1 box of currants

1-2 citrons or lemons, cut up into very small pieces

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup molasses (not medieval either. Earliest mention of molasses was in 1592 in Nicholas Lichefield's translation of Lopez de Castanheda's First Booke of the Histoire of the Discoverie and Conquest of the East Indias. It was a later addition to mince pies, but I added it for a darker, burnt sugar sort of flavor. You could easily leave it out.)

1/2 cup cider

pinch of salt

black pepper

1-2 Tb mace

1-2 Tb allspice

1-2 Tb nutmeg

1-2 Tb cloves

4 Tb cinnamon

1/2 cup Brandy (first appeared in the 12th century and became more common in the fourteenth century. Alcohol is a must as a preservative. Yeah, that's it. A preservative.)

1/2 cup Madeira or Marsala wine

In a big pot or Dutch oven, cook the beef fat until rendered. Mix all other ingredients together except for brandy and wine and pour into pot with crispy and rendered fat and cook down. After it's cooked down for a bit, let it cool and then add brandy and wine.

In the meantime, prepare a good lard pastry dough (I put mine in a Wilton 10 x 3 pan). Place the dough in the bottom, pour in the cooled minced meat, and cover with more pastry. I folded the edges down till they were about halfway down in the pan, and crimped the edges. I cut some fancy swirls on top with a very sharp knife and gave it an egg and milk wash. Bake it at 350 for 45 minutes. After it cools for a bit on a rack, I was able to turn it out of the pan to put it on a presentation plate. Good cold or warm. Serves a small army.

Happy holidays from Poe's Deadly Daughters!

We hope you have a happy, healthy new year!

City Mouse, Country Mouse

by Sheila Connolly

I've always lived in the suburbs.

That sounds like the first line of a bad novel, doesn't it? But it's true—for most of my life I have lived somewhere on the outskirts of a city—New York, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco. I sometimes joke that I can't sleep without the sound of a commuter train rumbling by, because there has been one close enough to hear as far back as I can remember.

One of Aesop's fables tells the tale of the City Mouse and his cousin the Country Mouse. City Mouse of course thinks his lifestyle is the better one, but Country Mouse disagrees (after being confronted by two large and angry dogs at City Mouse's residence) and goes home to his less opulent but more peaceful place.

But what do you do if both sides appeal to you? Every time I visit New York or Boston or Philadelphia, I remember the excitement of a city—the richness of the cultural assets available all the time (if you can afford them); the ease of getting around, whether you prefer broad sidewalks, buses, trains or even taxis; the wealth of restaurants; and even the interesting food from street vendors (roasting chestnuts in New York, hot pretzels with mustard in Philadelphia). There's an almost physical boost that you feel from all that energy around you.

But then, I love the country. I've never been sure why, since I had little experience with it in my early life. My mother spent her high school years on a farm in Maine and hated it, so much so that she never went back. We were once driving together somewhere—Massachusetts? New Jersey?—and I was admiring the landscape, and she said "I hate the country." But I was always in love with rolling hills and open fields and…maybe it was the absence of people. Being alone has never frightened me.

The first time I visited Ireland, it felt like coming home. I likened it to putting on an old shoe—it was familiar and comforting, and I just slid into it like I belonged. Is there such a thing as an inherited memory? I found myself standing on the land where my Connolly ancestors lived for centuries—which still looks much like it would have when they were there—and saying to myself, how could they have left? Okay, maybe they were too busy trying to eke a living out of raising sheep and cattle on too-small fields to admire the view, but it had to have been imprinted on them from birth.

So here I sit, on the outermost reaches of a Boston suburb, with a commuter line that runs at the top of my street. If I could go anywhere I wanted, where would it be? Luckily for me I do it in my head, because I'm writing three series. The Orchard Mysteries are set in one of my favorite areas of western Massachusetts (where I had many generations of ancestors), where streets still bear the names of the farmers who settled there first, where small towns cluster around a green where the settlers' livestock grazed, and later the militia mustered for the Revolution. And I write the Museum Mysteries, set in the heart of Philadelphia, where I can revisit any number of the interesting museums, both large and small, as well as historic sites such as Independence Hall. And I'm going to be writing a series set in Ireland, where the past and the present collide in interesting ways: people who live in a stone cottage built in the 18th century have a satellite dish on the roof. They may work in a high-tech industry, but they still know when your great-grandfather emigrated. I get to enjoy each vicariously (with a few real visits thrown in—research, you know).

So which do you prefer? City or country? And may you find yourself where you want to be this holiday season!

The Chanukah Bush and Other Soothing Lies

Elizabeth Zelvin

For most people, the winter holidays bring a certain nostalgia—or post-traumatic memories, depending on what kind of childhood you had. I’m lucky to have had wonderful parents, but some of their quirks and crotchets, which appeared perfectly normal to me as a kid, appear in a different light from my adult perspective.

My family was Jewish, so you might imagine we always celebrated Chanukah. Wrong. My mother later denied this, but the way I remember it (the annual event and the later explanation), my parents realized that Christmas was a lot more fun than Chanukah: stockings stuffed with presents, a glittering tree with ornaments, a pile of presents, and, of course, Santa Claus.

In fact, I know I was a believer, because one of my earliest memories—at four? five? six?—is not of my father blowing the gaff, but of the moment just afterward: my mother saying, “Oh, Joe, don’t spoil her Santa Claus!” Anyway, we always had a Christmas tree, and I don’t think we started calling it a Chanukah bush until we were old enough to appreciate facetiousness.

In fact, the Chanukah bush was and probably still is a fairly common tradition among secular New York Jews with kids.

Our tree was a classic 1950s tabletop aluminum tree, which we decorated with the kind of ornaments you’ll now find in fleamarkets and yard sales and also making a comeback as modern reproductions.

The trees themselves have become collectibles, which you can find on eBay and elsewhere if you google “vintage aluminum trees.” Here are a few, none exactly the squat, bushy model, excellent for hanging ornaments, that lives on in my memory.

I believe I was eight or so when my parents decided it was important to pass on their Jewish heritage by having a menorah and lighting the Chanukah candles. The best part for kids, besides the fun of candles themselves, was the fact that it lasted eight nights, on each of which we got a present. Chanukah was a minor holiday in Judaism until the modern American frenzy of Christmas buying and decorating spurred Jewish families to turn it into something that could at least attempt to compete.

We had stockings, big woolen ones otherwise used for ice skating, until I went off to college at the age of 16, as well as presents on December 25 in addition to Chanukah.

By the time I married my Irish Catholic husband thirty years ago, my mother was denying that any of this had ever occurred. In her conveniently faulty memory, we had always celebrated Chanukah. My husband’s position was clearly stated from the start: “I don’t care what your mother thinks—we’re having a Christmas tree.”

And so we do, along with lighting the candles, eating pot roast and latkes, singing carols (music is another area in which Christmas beats Chanukah hands down), and opening the presents under the tree. My granddaughters, Jewish on my son’s side but being raised Catholic like their mom, will do all those things this year—on Boxing Day. That’s December 26, a holiday we don’t celebrate in America, but it comes in handy when the kids have three sets of grandparents. And on Christmas Day, we’ll probably follow another New York secular Jewish tradition: Chinese food for Christmas.

Favorite Books of 2011

Sandra Parshall
 
When I can look back over my list of books I’ve read or listened to since January and find more than a dozen that I loved and would recommend enthusiastically, I know it’s been an outstanding year for fiction.

As usual, most of the novels I’ve read have been crime fiction, but one unclassifiable book stands out as a gorgeous exercise of a writer’s extravagant imagination: The Night Circus. Erin Morgenstern’s first novel has its flaws like any book, but it’s worth reading for the imagery alone. The author proves what we sometimes tend to forget, that words alone can paint as powerful a picture as any film.

This year I also let down my guard against “supernatural mysteries” and fell in love with Michael 
 Koryta’s writing. I read So Cold the River, Koryta’s first paranormal novel, last year and loved the writing but wasn’t entirely persuaded that the story was my kind of thing. After reading Cypress House, a genuine thriller that happens to include talking corpses and glimpses of the future, I was a fan. I enjoyed The Ridge just as much. These are gritty, violent books, not for those with delicate sensibilities, but the writing is amazing and the supernatural elements add to rather than detract from the stories.

Two new writers joined my list of favorite, must-read authors: Chevy Stevens and S.J. Watson. Stevens’s first novel, Still Missing, is a woman’s gripping first-person account of her year as the captive of a lunatic and her eventual escape. Her second book, Never Knowing, is in many ways even more compelling, as it follows a young woman, adopted as a baby, through her discovery of her real parents’ identities and into a disastrously tangled relationship with the rapist who fathered her.

S.J. Watson’s debut novel, Before I Go to Sleep, is stunning. I was riveted by this story of a woman who has suffered a head injury and now loses her memory every time she goes to sleep. Christine wakes each morning not knowing who or where she is, who the man in bed with her is, or what her life was up to that moment. Assisted by a doctor, finding ways to get around her recurrent memory loss, Christine secretly pieces together her identity and the horrifying truth behind her injury. This is an amazing and terrifying psychological suspense novel.

I loved the latest books by writers already firmly ensconced on my favorite authors list: Iron House by John Hart; Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson; The Accident by Linwood Barclay; The Death Instinct by Jed Rubenfeld; The Silent Girl by Tess Gerritsen; Love You More by Lisa Gardiner.

 My two favorite novels of the year, though, were Fallen by Karin Slaughter and End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina. Both feature strong female cops investigating crimes that strike close to home. Fallen brings together Will Trent, Sara Linton, and Faith Mitchell in a tumultuous story that begins when Faith’s mother, once a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent like Faith, is kidnapped. Slaughter’s characters are hauntingly real, and her writing thrums with energy.

Denise Mina’s End of the Wasp Season is set in Ireland and has Detective Alex Morrow, heavily pregnant and about to go on maternity leave, chasing down the brutal killers of a young woman who seemed to have no enemies. The reader knows from the beginning who committed the crime, and the knowledge heightens rather than dampens the suspense as Alex begins to circle them – and realizes that the crime touches her personally.

I read others that I enjoyed, but these were the standouts, the books I know I’ll remember a year from now. And I have a bunch of 2011 books yet to read -- Margaret Maron's Three-Day Town, for example -- that I know I will love.

Which books were your favorites this year?

Banking the Fires

Sharon Wildwind

I hope you’re not on some horrendous deadline at the moment, because this blog is about one word.

Stop

Whether you’re celebrating Hanukkah, Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa or some combination of those and other holidays, it’s time to rest. Right, along with last-minute shopping, a couple of holiday parties, defrosting a thirty-pound turkey, driving half-way across the state (if not the country) and putting up with an unconscionable number of relatives around the festive table.

Before I made a commitment to this writing business, back when writing was a very serious hobby, the last two weeks of December were often the only time during the year when I could put serious time into writing. One of the advantages of being a professional writer is that having spent the other 50 weeks of the year worrying about the writing and the marketing, I feel justified in taking the last two weeks of December off.

If you’ve ever warmed yourself with a wood fire, or even a fireplace, you’ll know that if you don’t want to wake up freezing your tail off in the morning, the one essential task is to bank the fire the last thing at night. The same is true for writers. There is a good chance that it’s going to be as hard cranking up the writing machine come January 2nd or 3rd, as it’s going be actually going to the gym. (You did make that resolution to get healthier next year, didn’t you?)

So here are some things you need to do to bank that writers’ fire so it will burn brightly next month.

Check your stock of printer cartridges, computer paper, pens. While you’re out buying those last-minute stocking stuffers, stop by the office supply store and lay in a stock so you’ll have a drawer of fresh supplies waiting for you after the holidays.

Buy yourself a really nice card; making yourself one is even better. Sit down for thirty minutes and write yourself a love letter. Pat yourself on the back for all the wonderful writing you did in 2011 and encourage all the wonderful writing you are going to do in 2012. Mail it to yourself on Christmas Eve.

If you don’t have one already, put a notebook and pen beside your bed. Write “For Later” at the top of a clean page. If you get a wonderful idea over the holidays, jot it down. Get back to it after you’ve had a rest.

Make a writing date for January. Take a course or invite your writing buddies to lunch. There’s nothing like group energy to give you a push to get started again.

Finally, clean your desk. Yes, really. Neaten. Sort. Tidy. File. Dust. Maybe even get out some nice-smelling furniture polish and give it a once over. Sharpen your pencils. And then put a sheet over the whole thing, walk away, and turn out the desk light.

See you in a couple of weeks.

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Quote for the week
Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering. ~Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A.A. Milne

A Child's Birthday in Chicago

by Julia Buckley

It always starts to feel like holiday time a bit early in our house, because my son, born on December 23rd, starts off the round of partying with his birthday celebration. Inspired by Dylan Thomas' wonderful story "A Child's Christmas in Wales," I thought I would relate some of the highlights of the day that will at some point be merely part of a tapestry of memories in my son's mind, or as Thomas put it "the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep."

It starts with endless cleaning, shopping, and decorating; a harried mother telling her sons to leave their junk off of her tables, to keep their muddy shoes from her floors, to stop wrestling near the tree and jingling the ornaments in a dangerous fashion. And then there is the laying out of food: cheese and crackers and organic apples from Trader Joe's; little tangerines in tall glass containers; chocolate-covered cherries and almonds in candy dishes adorned with angels. And then there are the main courses: Italian sausages, browned to perfection with green pepper sauce, and a tray of mostaciolli with meatballs. Giant loaves of Italian bread and sliced Artisan loaves, which my youngest son could not stop sneaking away from the table.

There are sliced melons and fresh strawberries and a cheese round crusted with cherries and almonds. There are candles everywhere, because candles have always meant celebration in my family. This is the house before the party, and before the chaos.

My mother, all but silenced by her battle with aphasia, still loves to sing and hear music, and my son and his cousin Dan, fine musicians both, surprised us all with a lovely guitar and ukelele version of Silent Night which was particularly beautiful.

Here is my lovely mother, sitting with her youngest niece Pammy, loving the music and the chaotic jubilation around her. Luckily today's music is the beginning rather than the end, since we'll be singing all the way through the New Year.

This is a time of Christmas-like anticipation, and Ian has become used to a Christmas tree as a backdrop to his growing older. It is a time of joyful antics, including trying the Santa hat on both cat and dog.

Dylan Thomas wrote "There are always uncles at Christmas--the same uncles," and this is true of Ian's birthday as well. There are Uncle Kevin and Uncle Chris and Uncle Bill (and sometimes Uncle Jim), and below Uncle Bill shows his avuncular support by creating an i-Phone flame in response to his nephews' impromptu concert.

Thomas wrote of "the useless presents," which were also the most fun. Somehow, inexplicably and much to everyone's surprise, the false mustaches emerged just as the party was winding down, and the family paparazzi responded to this fine display of faux facial hair and ironic haberdashery, perhaps inspired by their immigrant ancestors (in their case, both Irish and Hungarian).

The beagle, worn out from the barking which dominated the first half hour of the party, has only energy left to beg for sausages at the foot of the table. As usual, he is fed more than is appropriate, and will sleep like a small brown log all night long.

Ian, who solicitously helped his grandfather set up his Kindle, who poured hot coffee for both of my parents when their mugs were empty, and who appeared to take their coats the moment they walked in, now basks in his pile of presents, his company gone. The King of all presents is a new guitar--an Ibanez, transparent blue sunburst acoustic/electric with an on-board tuner--and he is playing gentle tunes as we all flop on the couch and content ourselves with the knowledge that he is seventeen now, nearly adult but still our son and here with us, and healthy: the best of all gifts.

And so this day blends with all the other days in our memories, and as we drift off to sleep tonight in what Thomas called "a close and holy darkness," we will be glad for the chance to observe these rituals which remind us what family is for.

Canada Calling: Stephen Legault

Stephen Legault is a Canadian social activist, consultant, professional photographer, and writer. He is the author of numerous non-fiction works and three (so far) mystery series, featuring protagonists in the Utah desert, an environmentalist/ investigator, and a disabled Mountie in the 1880s.

PDD: What links Durrant Wallace, Cole Blackwater and Silas Pearson as characters?

Stephen
Almost nothing, except all are men and, to some degree, misanthropes.

Silas has spent years crawling around the Utah desert in the hopes of finding his missing wife’s body. That’s not something he cares to share with a lot of other people. In a mystery series hunting for a body can only go on so long; eventually he has to find something. That’s why I’ve only plotted the first three Red Rock Canyon Mysteries. If an angry mob with pitch forks demands more, then I have plenty of other material to extend Silas’ journey.

Cole is a grumpy, anti-social drinker, but underneath is soft-hearted. His issues with anger and his family, and the questions that engage him, whether they be stopping a mining project in Alberta; threats to British Columbia wild salmon because of massive farming operations; or the plight of the homeless in downtown Vancouver are far reaching. I see his story arc as potentially open-ended. Sometimes too much potential can create more problems for a writer. I don’t want Cole to repeat himself, so in the third book, The Vanishing Track, some of Cole’s problems from the previous books are resolved, but he’s left with a whole new set of problems to deal with. The Vanishing Track will be published in the spring of 2012.

Durrant is also a misanthrope and anti-social, but for very different reasons than Cole. He was a young man when Confederation happened in 1867. He was part of the Northwest Mounted Police March West in the summer of 1874. Three years before The End of the Line, when the first book in the series starts, he was, in the slang of the times zinged, zipped, but not zeroed. Being shot in the line of duty, and severely disabled as a result, but not killed. It left him an outcast. I think Durrant would have rather been dead. He has a meaningless job, sorting the mail and taking the census in the newly minted Fort Calgary, but he wants more. And the society of the time has a hard time seeing that he has more to give.

The Durrant Wallace series has the incredible advantage of being set during the literal creation of Canada. In the fifty years between Confederation and World War I, Western Canada saw the Northwest Mounted Police sent to the west; the coming of the railroad; waves of immigration, each one different from the last; incorporation of cities all across the prairies; the formation of provinces and territories out of what was the North West Territories; the Second Riel Rebellion; the establishment of Banff National Park, the first national park in Canada; periodic man-made and natural disasters, including a terrible fire in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1886; the Yukon gold rush; and racial unrest. Canadian troops were sent to the Boer War. Bill Miner staged the first Canadian train robbery. The first Calgary Stampede was held and oil was discovered in Alberta.

For a historical mystery writer, that’s like a huge box of candy. It all looks so delicious, it’s hard to know where to start, and so I chose to start in 1884 when the railway was being built in Alberta.

PDD: In researching Durrant’s series, what did you learn about railroad building across the Canadian prairies in the 1880s?

Stephen
Three words: individual bloody toil. While there were a few steam-powered machines, and there certainly were explosives, the majority of the railroad was built by men using their muscles.

Many people assume that Chinese laborers built the Canadian railroad. That was true on the Western side of the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia on what was called the Onderdonk section, named for the man in charge Andrew Onderdonk. But on the Eastern side the laborers were mainly Americans and Europeans.

These men lived in box cars or in tent shanties, with planks for beds and a leaky wood stoves for heat. They did hard physical labor in all kinds of weather and rarely had a day off. Because explosives contracts were written so that the contractor was paid by the volume of material blasted, companies looked for the longest routes possible in order to make the most money, putting the workers lives on the line.

The workers’ only recreation was what they provided themselves: gambling and drinking. The Canadian Pacific Railway prohibited making or selling whiskey within 10 miles of CPR property, so the whiskey trade moved to 10 miles and 1 foot outside the temperance zone. There was a lot of illegal whiskey made in the CPR camps, and often men walked 10 miles through dangerous mountains to have a drink. Some never returned.

Many Canadians have this idea that settling the country north of the 49th parallel was a lot more civilized than in the American wild west. It was and it wasn’t. There were ten or twelve thousand men living in shanty towns along the CPR right-of-way. Those towns were often lawless; there were only a handful of Mounties patrolling a vast area. In my research I found first hand accounts of murders happening with no investigations, and very little fuss.

I lived in one of those towns, Lake Louise, in the early 1990’s when I worked for Parks Canada. In the winter of 1884, when The End of the Line is set, there were five hundred men left behind after the construction season, in what was then called Holt City. Four months at temperatures below minus thirty, with thirty feet of snow on the ground: it was a recipe for murder if there ever was one.

PDD: You bring in Sam Steele as something of a mentor to Durrant. What are the challenges of including a real historical figure in a work of fiction?

Stephen
To quote Mark Twain, “First know your facts, and then you can distort them as much as you please.” With Sam Steele, the facts jump out at you: the March West, Sitting Bull, the North-West Rebellion, Fort Steele, the Yukon gold rush, the Boer War, and World War I. Sam was there for all of them. Now that we know these facts, I plan to have a great time distorting them for Durrant’s benefit.

Durrant’s story is about redemption. What he desperately wants, and what I plan to give him, is a second chance at life. But not without a great deal of physical and emotional turmoil first. In order to have that second chance he needs a powerful mentor. Sam Steele embodied the quintessential Western Canadian attitude of ‘try diplomacy before you resort to force’, and that’s the kind of mentor Durrant will need if he’s going to reclaim his life.

Stephen’s books are published by TouchWood Editions.
Please visit Stephen online at or follow him on Twitter at @stephenlegault.

Win a copy of the End of the Line. Leave a comment below to have a chance to win! A name will be drawn at random on Monday morning.

The Golden Age of Musicals

by Sheila Connolly

It's been a while since my daughter was young enough to require entertainment during school breaks, but this time of year always reminds me of the Good Old Days when my sister and I were young.

One of the treats of those golden years (well, I am talking about the 1950s, when apparently—or so say today's pundits—everything was better, except for all the smoking) was going to the theater. Since my grandmother lived in New York, that meant Broadway.

I cut my teeth on Broadway musicals. My parents both loved them, and saw them regularly. They religiously brought home the original cast albums, which we played frequently, despite the fact that my father wouldn't let my sister and me go near the "record player." But once a careful adult put a record on, my sister and I would do something resembling a polka up and down the hallway. As a result, the lyrics of many of the musicals of the '50s are forever imprinted on my brain.

Since I was older than my sister, I had the chance to see several of the classics with my mother, or my mother and grandmother. Always matinees, of course, and child-appropriate. My mother set me off on the right foot with Peter Pan—yes, the original version with Mary Martin, which to my surprise had a very short run, which seems unusual for what became an enduring staple. It was first produced in 1954, and I must have seen it that year, because I remember being much shorter than the bar in the lobby, where my mother bought me a soda at intermission. I gather that it was televised as early as the year after that, and all my friends and I knew the lyrics. Want me to sing "I Won't Grow Up" for you?

I saw My Fair Lady early on, not first run but in its second 1958 run. I saw Camelot when it was new (Julie Andrews in both, and Robert Goulet when he was hot), and even now the music reduces me to tears. (On a literary note, I read the source book, T. H. White's The Once and Future King, when I was eleven, when it made little sense to me, but I loved the first part, with young Wat and all the animals.) It should be no surprise that I still have those well-played vinyl albums.

I think even I felt the change in the nature of Broadway shows in the 1960s. We saw a couple of shows that sank like a stone in collective memory. Our family efforts were waning when we saw Mr. President (1962-63), a somewhat odd vehicle for stars Nanette Fabray and Robert Ryan, about which I remember next to nothing except the First Lady's overacting. I think our last effort took in Canterbury Tales, probably in 1964 (I could find all the playbills, but they're in the attic and it's cold up there), from which I recall only one song: "I Have a Noble Cock."

I'm grateful that I had the chance to see all of these. I can't say I've been a consistent theater-goer ever since, and as an adult my selections have run more to non-musical productions. But attending a live performance is not like watching a movie, either in a theater or on a smaller screen. Live, there is always the chance of a poor performance, if one of the stars is having a bad day; but if a production comes together just right, it's magic, especially when you're sharing it with a full audience. Maybe it's like Tinkerbell: you have to believe to make it happen.

Cover Shot

Elizabeth Zelvin

Back when my first mystery was about to come out, a lot of people heard the story of the head shot that not only appeared on the book jacket, but became my “brand” image: on my website, all my bookmarks, eventually my Blogger profile, my Facebook page, and everywhere else a photo was needed to depict Elizabeth Zelvin, author.

It was the shot I loved among a hundred snapped by a fellow writer/off-duty professional photographer, and I got a lot of comic mileage out of how the backlit halo effect turned into what looked like a row of cotton balls sitting on my head in the high-res version. I finally succeeded in getting the hair touched up, and the final product was so effective that I swore I would never replace that smiling face that hasn’t aged a day since 2006 with any other picture.

Since then, my life in the mystery world has generated a lot of candid shots at conventions and book launches, not all of them looking so terrible. Photography technology has progressed to the point where I was able to take my own passport photo recently, holding my little digital camera away from my face to snap it. Now, that was a terrible picture. But no one expects better on a passport, and as long as I don’t leave the country, no one will see it.

I’ve been working for the past year or so on a recording of original songs I’ve been writing and performing for the past fifty years, and the time has come to think about packaging a CD for Liz Zelvin, Outrageous Older Woman. I know this Liz is different from Elizabeth Zelvin, author.

I needed new photos, and since I unfortunately don’t have a portrait in a closet somewhere like Dorian Gray to take the signs of aging time has deposited on my face, I needed a professional photographer who could make me look good. I went a-googling (“Upper West Side portrait photographers”) and found a kindred spirit: Nancy Pindrus, photographer.

Nancy lives and works in a wonderful old apartment near Central Park with two parrots (the elder, age 37, is a music lover whose repertoire includes both “Cancan” and “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring”) and a cat whose dander had me croaking when I tried to sing during my first visit to give her an idea of what would lie behind the album cover.

(Before the five-hour shoot, she ran an air purifier for twenty-four hours, and it worked better than any antihistamine I’ve ever taken for my cat allergy.) I had no problem assembling props: my guitar, of course; a big red hat; drop-dead earrings, a flamboyant outfit, a red feather boa. The problem came when she said, “Of course, you’ll need makeup.”

Makeup has never been my friend. I could probably use that passport and take a trip around the world with the money I’ve saved over a lifetime (not to mention the time) not using cosmetics. My line has always been, “My father never used makeup, and he had skin like a baby till the day he died at 91.” But for this photo shoot, it was not optional.

“I’ll tell you exactly what to buy,” she said. “You know what foundation is, right? Concealer?” Not really. I’ve walked right past all that stuff in CVS thousands of times. I finally convinced her that we’d be better off if she made me up in situ. (And I wasn’t kidding when I said I needed Cosmetics for Dummies. I volunteered to buy a couple of lipsticks and came back with lip gloss instead.) “But I don’t do eyelashes,” she said. “You need them, the more over-the-top the better, and you’ll have to put them on yourself.”

“You don’t understand,” I whined. My last encounter with false eyelashes was in 2002, when for my son’s wedding I tried valiantly to create a dramatic look that would come across well in the photos and ended up throwing the damn lashes across the room. But I did want to cooperate, really. And my own eyelashes could not possibly be called outrageous.

So I went out and bought two pairs of these weird little fringes. One claimed to be self-adhesive, the other came with its own little tube of glue. On the day of the shoot, I got up early, took a few calming breaths, and tried. I really, really tried.

The result—well, Nancy took one look at me and started laughing. In the end, she pasted the second pair (forget about “self-adhesive” and “reusable”) on my lids in the right place. She stroked and patted makeup of various kinds all over my face. Like any other artist, she kept stepping back to see her work and muttering, “Damn, I’m good!” In the end, I looked fabulous. If I had a handmaiden to put my face on, I could look glamorous every day. Since I don’t, I’m thrilled to have these fantastic photos.