So Long and Au Revoir from Poe's Deadly Daughters

After seven years, Poe's Deadly Daughters are saying goodbye, but we hope it's not farewell for good. We've thoroughly enjoyed your company! Here are some of the places you can still find us and our work.

Sandra Parshall

I'll admit I resisted the idea of blogging at first -- but my first novel had been published, my second was coming out soon, and most of the writers I knew had blogs. My friend Lonnie Cruise thought a group blog was a great idea, so did Liz Zelvin and Sharon Wildwind and Julia Buckley, and all my resistance vanished. We fussed around with a name for a while, knowing we wanted to honor our mutual idol but unable to come up with anything that seemed right until Liz's husband presented us with the perfect moniker. We've filled this space for seven years as Poe's Deadly Daughters, stretching ourselves, exploring an incredible variety of topics, and making many, many new friends along the way. I hope we won't lose touch with the closing of PDD but will continue our conversation in other places.

You can find me spending far too much time chatting on my Facebook profile page: https://www.facebook.com/sgparshall

Book news is easy to find on my Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sandra-Parshall-Books/137978089669174?ref=br_rs

And, of course, my professional website (which will get a major do-over for spring 2014) will always be available: http://www.sandraparshall.com

I'll pop up as a guest blogger for friends from time to time, and in spring of 2014 I plan to launch an individual blog where I will post -- but not on a rigid schedule -- about books, animals, and any other subject that I just can't fit into a short Facebook message. I'll still be around on DorothyL and various other mystery listservs. I'll talk to you there!

Elizabeth Zelvin

I've loved being a Deadly Daughter: having blog sisters, the ongoing conversation with readers, and feeling like a journalist--in fact, a columnist, albeit an unpaid one--every week. I'll still be blogging every other Saturday on SleuthSayers at
http://sleuthsayers.org
You can get the latest news about my mysteries and fiction on my author website at
http://elizabethzelvin.com
You can visit me on Facebook at facebook.com/elizabeth.zelvin

All my mystery novels are available in both hardcover and e-editions. Many of my stories are available for e-readers, with more to come. Check out my author page on Amazon at amazon.com/Elizabeth-Zelvin/e/B001H6U2D6

My most recent novel is VOYAGE OF STRANGERS. It's about what really happened when Columbus discovered America. Voyage of Strangers is available for Kindle or Kindle app on your tablet or other device.

You can hear my CD of original songs, Outrageous Older Woman, on my music website at lizzelvin.com. Buy it there or look for Liz Zelvin on Amazon, iTunes, and CD Baby.
http://lizzelvin.com

In my psychotherapist "hat," I see clients by chat and email on my therapy site at http://LZcybershrink.com

Jeri Westerson 

I feel a little bit like I’m a rude party-goer, last to arrive and first to leave. I was asked to join this prestigious blog only a few years ago. At the time, I was writing three other blogs but I thought, why not? It was a privilege writing alongside some of the hardest working women in the business.

I’ve enjoyed my time here, and I'm still blogging, God help me. I’ve been doing my own blog, Getting-Medieval, since 2006, and don’t intend to hang it up anytime soon. It’s my little magazine of history and mystery (if you ever want to know the latest on medieval skeletons and other medieval news, that is the place to go!). Crispin Guest, my medieval knight turned detective, still writes in his “journal” every month or so. I am an infrequent Tweeter, a too-frequent Facebooker, a Goodreads lurker, and a new Pinterest enthusiast. 

You can find me at JeriWesterson.com and for my Skyler Foxe Mysteries under the name Haley Walsh at  SkylerFoxeMysteries.com.

Sheila Connolly

I'm a latecomer to the Daughters (only four years tenure), and I was honored to be invited to join them. This blog had always been one of the first I checked each day because the posts were thoughtful, informative and consistently well-written--a high standard to match, and a worthy one to aspire to.

We have seen some extraordinary and rapid changes in the publishing industry during the past few years, and perhaps we have come to believe collectively that this kind of blog is not the best way to reach our readers.  Certainly the competition for their attention is fierce and constant.

I know I am grateful to have had the opportunity to challenge myself to write something each week that made me think, and I hope made others think as well.  We are all writers first and foremost, and that means we want to reach other people.  That won't stop.

I write three mystery series, a few of which you faithful readers have helped to make bestsellers; I also write short stories and standalone books. That's not going to change, all things willing.

You can find me on my website www.sheilaconnolly.com (currently undergoing a major and long-awaited overhaul) and on Facebook. I will also still be blogging at Mystery Lovers' Kitchen on Fridays, and on Killer Characters on the 25th of each month.

It has been a pleasure to share our journey with you.


Sharon Wildwind

The last quote of the week
To the make of a Piper
goes seven years of his own learning
and seven generations before.
At the end of these seven years,
one born to it will stand at the start of
knowledge.

And learning, a fond ear to the drone he may
have to parlay with old folks of old affairs.

It is said, "When a Piper plays, he's in touch with the past.
The sense of being at one with generations of long ago is totally
unique."
- Neil Munro, Gaelic writer, (1863 to 1930)

How fitting to be moving on after seven years. It has been such a pleasure to get to know all of you. I have profited so much by all of the comments and private e-mails we have exchanged.

I love the part about, after seven years, standing at the start of knowledge. That's the way I feel. I'm still trying to get this writers' thing. I look forward to continuing our relationship on my web site www.wildwindauthor.com, and on Twitter @sharww.

Julia Buckley

It's been lovely sharing a blog for seven years with these fun, intelligent women who happen to share my love for mystery novels. I'm glad that Lonnie and Darlene have posted, as well, since they were among the founders of the blog, and it was Lonnie Cruse who asked me if I'd like to join the gang.  Thanks, Lonnie!

I will miss being a part of PDD, but I'll be around.  I have a new series coming out from Berkley next year, and I hope you'll watch for it either at my website, www.juliabuckley.com, or on Facebook (friend me under Julia Buckley or Julia Buckley mystery novels).  My twitter handle is JuliaBucks.  And I'll still maintain my blog Mysterious Musings, where I've interviewed close to 200 mystery writers. 

Happy New Year to you all!  I hope to see you all regularly in all of the cyber places where the lovers of good books gather to celebrate reading and writing.

Ave atque Vale

by Sheila Connolly

I first posted here almost exactly four years ago.  I was honored to be asked to join the blog, because back then I was a relatively new writer (my first book had been published a year and a half earlier), and I was still learning about the universe of writers and readers.  PDD’s writers had always struck me as thoughtful and intelligent and well-informed, and I had learned a lot from their posts.

Being part of the blog forced me to be thoughtful too. Sometimes it’s easy to toss off a quick post about whatever strikes your fancy at a given moment.  You can be cute and glib and make a few people laugh or smile, and then they forget about it.  There’s nothing wrong with entertaining people--isn’t that what fiction writers do?  But making readers take a step back and think is harder.

The world of publishing has changed dramatically in the past four years.  Early fans of Dick Tracy might have seen it coming (remember that wrist device?) but probably the rest of us who yearned to become writers had grown up with a very different model, one that involved sitting in an unheated garret with a quill pen.  No sooner did we think we had learned something than the publishing universe made a 90-degree shift and we had to start all over (more than once).  When we did master a medium, such as one of the social networking sites, it collapsed of its own weight or was taken over by somebody else or its managers decided it should be something different.

I’m sounding like a Luddite, aren’t I?  I embrace technology, and the expanded opportunities to communicate with many people in a timely fashion.  And there’s no stuffing the genie back in the bottle: the Internet is not a flash in the pan, but a part of our daily lives.  But that comes with its own problems, not the least of which is the demands that constant, instant communication place on our time.  We’re afraid we’ll miss something critical or be left out of the loop, so we’re always checking this or that.

And that can be a challenge for bloggers.  Remember when blogs were new? They were a novelty and a curiosity.  Then for a while, everyone believed they had to have a blog, or participate in multiple blogs, often egged on by their agents, editors and peers. Predictably, thousands of blogs popped up, and now it’s very hard to stand out, much less attract new followers. No one person can follow more than a handful—and that includes me.

So we at Poe’s Deadly Daughters are folding our tents and slipping away. (I was thinking of quoting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poignant poem The Day is Done, where this image originated, but since Longfellow tended to be a bit longwinded, it’s better to read the whole thing here. Don’t worry—the Daughters will all be around, just not in this space.

Thank you all for following us.

Christopher Columbus and Me

Elizabeth Zelvin

As my blog sisters and I prepare to say farewell to Poe's Deadly Daughters and all of you, the readers who have joined us here, I'm hoping fervently that this is not the end of our relationship but just a bend in the road, a hiccup in our ongoing conversation online, with some of you in person, and through the books we all love. So this is not a valedictory post. In fact, it didn't even occur to me that was an option until I started reading this week's posts. I'm sad to see the blog ending and to lose the daily connection with my blog sisters. AND (as we used to say in the Seventies, when we first discovered there was an emotional down side to BUT), I'm excited about my new novel, Voyage of Strangers , the sequel to my short story, "The Green Cross", which first appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best Short Story.

SO (great way to start a sentence if you're writing a New York Jewish character--no comma, and it doesn't have to be a sequitur) here's how it came about that I wrote "The Green Cross." One night about five years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with an unfamiliar but insistent voice knocking on the inside of my head.

"Let me out! Let me out!" it said.

It was Diego, a young marrano sailor, who would board the Santa Maria with Columbus in 1492, on the same day the Jews were expelled from Spain.

"Leave me alone!" I said. "I don't want to get out of bed and write your story down. I don't write historical fiction. I don't want to do research. I hate research."

"Let me out! Let me out!" Diego said.

Eventually, if only to shut him up, I got out of bed and scribbled a few notes. In the morning, reading them over, I still didn't want to write the story. I hated research. But Diego's voice was still insistent. I went online and discovered that material was readily available. It even included portions of the logbook that Columbus himself kept on the voyage. Within half an hour, I had enough for that first story, which took place on the Santa Maria and ended with the sighting of the first signs of land.

In turn, "The Green Cross" led to its sequel, "Navidad," which also appeared in EQMM. The novel itself continues the story of my protagonist Diego and his sister Rachel on Columbus's second voyage in 1493-1495. By that time, I had changed my mind about research, having fallen under the spell that motivates writers of historical fiction, learned a lot more about the tragic course of Columbus's discovery, and become fascinated by the many details that were more mindboggling than any I could have invented. My character Columbus changed from a kindly father-figure with detective skills to an obsessed and deluded leader who destroyed an earthly paradise and committed genocide on its people.

Diego and Rachel, secret Jews and therefore outsiders surrounded by the Spaniards' Christian culture, come of age in this doomed paradise, experiencing divided loyalties, love, and heartbreak in the course of Voyage of Strangers. Rachel, who was born as I wrote the first draft, is one of my favorite characters among all those I've created. Her voice and Diego's got stronger and stronger. The story poured out of me--not my usual experience with the first draft of a novel--my hero and heroine's fictional adventures weaving themselves almost effortlessly into the fabric of what actually happened in history.

Unfortunately, in another of those stranger-than-fiction scenarios, as I wrote Voyage of Strangers, our own early-twenty-first-century world underwent a paradigm shift. The publishing industry imploded. By the time my novel was ready, everything had changed for both readers and writers. The agent for my mysteries was not interested in representing Voyage of Strangers. Over the next two years, I tried assiduously to find an agent or a publisher. I had some near misses, but the net result of 150 attempts was zero. Finally, I decided to publish Voyage of Strangers as an e-book.

My decision to publish Voyage of Strangers on Amazon for Kindle is based on my experiences with marketing and promotion in the digital age, both with e-publishers who have picked up my work and previously published works that I've put online myself. I hope that not only those of you who have Kindles will read it, but also readers who have or can download a free Kindle app on your computers or tablets, especially existing fans of my work. If you enjoyed my Bruce Kohler mysteries and/or my short stories, especially "The Green Cross," I bet you'll like Voyage of Strangers. You'll learn a lot you didn't know about the discovery of America. I hope you'll fall in love with the characters and that the book will make you laugh and cry. I'll leave you with a bright idea about time management for readers. Our blog posts on PDD average about 700 words. A novel runs 70,000 words. So if you take the time you've been using to read the blog and apply it to each of our latest novels (Julia's on Mondays, Sharon's on Tuesdays etc)--well, you do the math.

This isn't goodbye

The winner of a free copy of Poisoned Ground is Aubrey Hamilton. Aubrey, please send your mailing address to sparshall@verizon.net. Thank you all for reading Poe's Deadly Daughters! 
 
By Sandra Parshall

Sitting down to write my last blog entry for Poe’s Deadly Daughters prompted me to look up my first – a post about the transformation of a novel into a film and why it shouldn’t be regarded as an assault on the original, unchanged work of the author. 

That first piece was published on January 24, 2007. So long ago. So many posts between then and now.

Letting go of something that’s been a major part of one’s identity as a writer is a daunting prospect, and it’s not something any of us on PDD is taking lightly. Like all my blog sisters, I’ve enjoyed the camaraderie with our readers, getting to know new people, stretching my mind by tackling subjects from the familiar (writing; animals) to the professional (the impact of ebooks on the publishing business) to the thought-provoking (recent discoveries about the function of memory, a particular interest of mine). I hope all of you have enjoyed my posts too. Your feedback has always been appreciated – and yes, I’ll miss PDD and its readers.

But it’s time to make changes and shake things up a little. The simple fact that most of the comments about our blog entries are now being posted on Facebook rather than the blog itself indicates that readers are choosing new ways to communicate. And that’s what we’ll be doing: finding new ways to communicate with our friends in cyberspace. It’s not as if we’re moving to a Siberian outpost without internet access. We’ll be around, and most of us will still be blogging here and there. After a brief and much needed vacation from blogging, I’ll be doing some guest posts when my sixth Rachel Goddard novel, Poisoned Ground, comes out March 4, and I’ll have a personal blog on my snazzy new website, which should be unveiled sometime in February.

 

So it’s time to retire the Poe’s Deadly Daughters pin I’ve worn to mystery conferences. (If anybody wants one as a souvenir, I have half a dozen I can give away. Just ask.) Despite a tinge of sadness, my strongest emotions are pride in what we’ve done here over the years and pleasure in the friendships I’ve formed with my wonderful blog sisters and our readers.

To mark the occasion of my last PDD post, I’d like to offer a free hardcover copy of Poisoned Ground to one of our readers, to be delivered when I receive my author copies in late February. To enter the drawing, just leave a comment.

Thank you again for your loyalty to PDD. I know we’ll be talking again many times, in other places.

Auld Lang Syne

Sharon Wildwind

The weather is appreciably gloomy this morning: sleet, frozen rain, and a promise of snow and wind until noon. I’m rather glad. It fits my mood. If it were bright sunshine and blue sky, it would be even harder to say good-bye.

When I started here with the Daughters, I was working on book number three in my first mystery series. That series finished out at five books.

As I leave the Daughters, here’s what I have on the go:

• Carrying the Blood - a stand-alone mystery set in a Calgary folk music club needs one more read through before it’s ready to go looking for a publisher.
• Willful Missing - my first complete play will be entered in a contest March 1
• Whiskeyjack - I’ve started work on the first book in my new series, set in a nursing station in northern Alberta. One of the main characters is from the Isle of Sky, and Burns Night is only 11 days away, so here’s a little bit of Scottish flavor to go out on.

Some ad is likely to pop up in the middle of this. I'd turn it off if I knew how, but I don't, so just click the little X to make it go away.



And here’s my deep, dark secret — I’m writing a little fan fic set in the Harry Potter universe. At my age? As someone in my critique group said, “Why the heck not?”

I know if I hit a rough spot in any of this I can call on any of you, and you'd be glad to help. That's what friends are for.

The same back to you. If I can be of any help as you write, please get in touch with me.

web: www. wildwindauthor.com
blog: sharoncreate@wildwindauthor.com
Twitter: @sharww
Google+: Google.com/+Wildwindauthor

Final quote:

© Photo Lance Keimig/Isle of Skye

Lance is a wonderful photographer who specializes in night photography. Check out Night Photography here.

A Farewell, Shakespearean Style

by Julia Buckley

We are all saying bittersweet goodbyes on Poe's Deadly Daughters this week.  As life would have it, I am also teaching Shakespeare's The Tempest, which is filled with themes of loss, sacrifice, and farewell, so I've been contemplating my farewells via the language of The Bard.

The main character of The Tempest is Prospero, a brilliant man who becomes a mighty sorcerer.  Some critics suggest that he is meant to be a reflection of Shakespeare himself, since The Tempest was his final play. While Prospero enjoys twelve years alone on a magical island (aside from his daughter and a monster named Caliban), and his personal power builds to a mighty climax, he ultimately sees it all as an illusion--"We are such stuff as dreams are made on"--and decides to give it all up: his power, his daughter, his grudge against those who tried to kill him, his spirit friend, Ariel.

Despite the enormity of his loss, Prospero sees that it is right for him to move on.  His daughter will marry, he will forgive his murderous brother, and he will return to Italy, where he plans to retire, and "where every third thought shall be my grave."

The beast Caliban, once Prospero's slave, will be left to rule his island alone, and Ariel, Prospero's beloved spirit slave, will be allowed, after decades of servitude, to fly away.  Prospero asks him to do one last job--to ensure good winds to blow the ship back to Italy. Prospero says, "Ariel, Chick, that is thy charge, and then to the elements be free, and fare thou well."

While we daughters were not mighty sorcerers, we enjoyed a special camaraderie here on the blog, which was its own little island in the virtual world.  We all feel, despite our enjoyment of the blog and one another's company, that it is time to move on (where our thoughts will not be of our graves, but of our new writing projects).  Like the other daughters, I will still be posting--in my case, at Mysterious Musings, a blog even older than PDD, but which has been mouldering a bit and now will be revitalized.  I have a new series contract with Berkley Prime Crime, and I look forward to writing about my experiences in the coming months.

I will miss being a part of this blog, which I like to think was a fun and interesting resource for those in the mystery community, and even for those who merely sought a thought-provoking post.  I will miss my fellow daughters, but I will keep in touch with them online (thank you, Facebook).

I wish all of our readers well, and to my wonderful Poe sisters, I say, "To the elements be free, and fare thou well."

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye

by Darlene Ryan
aka Sofie Kelly and Sofie Ryan
 


I was going to begin by saying that everyone dislikes goodbyes, and then I remembered one of my mother’s friends, who always said she didn’t mind goodbye because it just put her a little closer to hello again. This is my second goodbye to Poe’s Deadly Daughters. The first time, I knew the blog was going to continue. I knew I could drop by. I knew that I was just a few cyber-steps from hello again. This time however, it really is so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye.

My first post on Poe’s Deadly Daughters was as a guest in January of 2007, seven years ago. It feels a lot longer than that. Later, I became a weekend regular on the blog. I almost said no to that invitation. I was a Young Adult author, intimidated about being in the company of women who were more accomplished in a genre that I used to joke I couldn’t break into with a crowbar. But I swallowed down those fears long enough to say yes. And quickly discovered that I had found my tribe. I wasn’t just surrounded—figuratively if not literally—by five women who were doing what I aspired to do—publish a mystery novel. I had been embraced by five women who were happy to share what they knew, and to encourage me not to give up on my dreams.

In 2007, I had five books to my credit, but my first mystery wouldn’t be published for four more years. Now I have thirteen published books, with two more coming out later this year. That’s close to 700,000 published words and even more written and discarded. Back then the only name I wrote under was my own. Now I’m Darlene Ryan, Sofie Kelly and Sofie Ryan. (The Sofies have better hair than I do.) Sofie Kelly has made it into the top ten of the New York Times paperback bestseller list. That was a dream I would never have shared with anyone back in 2007 because it seemed so farfetched.

Seven years ago, I was the mother of a nine-year-old with a mouth full of braces. Today I’m the mother of a beautiful sixteen-year-old with straight, white teeth. Her orthodontist has gone to Vegas five times in the past seven years. I’m pretty sure I know who paid for those trips.

Four days before my first Poe’s post, my smart-beyond-his-years great-nephew was born. He’s either going to grow up to be the next Bill Gates or a real-life Iron Man. Any day now he’ll become a big brother for the first time: a joyous hello. Sadly, his great grandmother—my mother—who was so delighted by his birth, can’t remember that a new baby is going to join the family. Alzheimer’s Disease takes away another little piece of her each day in a long, slow goodbye.

There is a quote, often attributed to Chaucer, that reads, “There is an end to everything. Good things as well.” Poe’s Deadly Daughters is one of those good things. Thank you to the original daughters, Sandy, Liz, Julia, Lonnie and Sharon for letting me be a small part of what you created here. I hope this ending just puts us that much closer to hello again.

Beginning and Ending of Poe's Deadly Daughters

by Lonnie Cruise
Founding member of Poe's Deadly Daughters 

I was extremely honored to be a part of Poe’s Deadly Daughters when we began the blog and only left the group when I retired from writing mysteries. Each of us Daughters wrote very diverse kinds of mysteries yet there was that “Poe’s thread” that ran throughout.  Sort of like a dark cloak surrounding the group, holding us together.  If you’ve read Poe’s work, you know what I mean.  If not, you should get a copy of his works right away.  You won’t be disappointed.
 
I still write non-fiction for women, but mysteries are my first and greatest love.  I retired from writing mysteries because I’d pretty much said all I had to say in that genre, writing novels takes a lot out of everything in me, and getting published is tough, at best!  Still, I wouldn’t trade those years for anything.  Holding the very first hardback copy of my first published book in my hands just one month shy of my sixtieth birthday, wow, that was something!  Meeting fans who were as excited to meet me as I was to meet them.  Signing autographs.  Giving talks.  Appearing on panels at mystery conferences.  Teaching classes on writing.  I dreamed of writing but I never dreamed those kinds of wonderful perks came with it!

Most of my life I enjoyed reading various mystery authors with wildly varied points of view and dreamed of writing my own mystery novels one day. But in the back of my mind I thought authors had to attend college for the purpose of becoming an author, and that if I tried my hand at it, the journalism police would show up on my front door step.  Thankfully that never happened.  What did happen was that I read two mysteries by different well-known authors but each with HUGE plot errors that their well-paid editors didn’t catch.  Hmmmm.  Could I do any worse?  Probably, but why not give it a try?  I did.  And five years later, after many rejections, tears, long hours at the keyboard, encouragement and help from other writers (writers’ groups ARE your friends) I had my first manuscript published by a small but up-and-coming publisher.  

I now have six mysteries in print, still available on Amazon.com, the cyber-heaven for all readers and writers. And I still pinch myself now and then when I think of those books, like this morning when I walked by one of the many bookshelves in this home and saw them safely snuggled in there.  Wow! I actually wrote six books and someone actually published them!  And people bought them, read them, and let me know they enjoyed them!  MY books.  MY thoughts.  Who’da ever believed that would happen?
 
Do I have a point here?  Yeah, stick with me, we’re nearly there.  I preach this to any and everyone who will listen.  Is there something you dream of doing? No matter your age, education, experience, or current circumstances? Writing a book, climbing a mountain, traveling to a distant dream place, starting a different career? The list is endless.  My point is:  GO FOR IT!  You might fall flat on your face.  So what?  You learned something, right?  And probably had fun while you tried?  And supposing you succeed?  Then, what happens to you after will have endless varieties and endless surprises! And endless possibilities to lead you elsewhere.  One of my fondest dreams had been to write non-fiction for Christian women, and being published in the mystery genre opened the door for that dream to become reality.  Two published non-fictions, one in the works! So go after your dreams and enjoy the ride, for the journey is as much fun as getting there! 

Thank you all for your loyalty to Poe’s Deadly Daughters.  May all your life’s mysteries be enjoyable and solvable!  And may all your good dreams come true!

Who Do We Think We Are?

by Sheila Connolly

We’re all writers here, which means we create characters from our imagination.  That means we observe and analyze people (hoping we’re not too obvious).

But I started wondering about how people choose to present themselves to the world, and I realized I had a perfect (if small) sample, when I was looking at the Personals section of an alumni magazine for an institution of higher learning that shall remain nameless. It’s not a very long section, tucked in the rear—I guess a lot of alumni, most of whom are older and/or widowed, don’t want to admit they’re having trouble finding connections in the real world.  The young’uns still have hope, so they don’t bother.

So these well-educated people have one column inch, more or less, to define who they are—or who they want potential partners to believe they are. I was curious to see what features the seekers believed were important.  Here’s a list of first words, most often bolded: 

Well-traveled
Searching for
Warm, witty
A breath of fresh air
Warm, youthful (looking for someone 60-70)
Beautiful professor wonderful smile, contagious laugh, sparkling blue eyes
Smart and pretty, gracious warm and slender

This is the first thing you’ll see in a person’s listing; the opening chapter, in book terms, where you have to snag the reader’s attention and make them keep reading.

The next item is most often about the appearance of this person (each line comes from an individual listing): 

Radiant, inspiring, attractive, slender

Youthful, in shape, petite, brunette
Fit, very youthful (at age 70)
Stunning 5’8” blonde
Attractive
Beautiful, outgoing, slender, fit, an eye-catcher
Handsome, intellectual
Dynamic and outstanding VIP, stunner
Exceptionally accomplished, beautiful blonde, slender, fit

Beauty and fitness seem to come out on top.  I suppose we all want that from somebody north of 60.

What are these beautiful healthy people looking for?

Love, laughter and a beautiful future

Professionally accomplished (is that a code for wealthy?), healthy, active
Nice, sensitive, warm, finds humor in banter and whimsy
Someone to help me make the rest of my days more agreeable
A world traveler, exuberant with international sophistication, who enjoys contributing and giving back
Gentleman
Authentic, intellectually curious, loves nature/outdoor activities
Rugged/masculine on the outside and sensitive, kind, with good values on the inside
Soulful, creative, intellectual, attractive, thin, accomplished

There seems to be a balance between those who will share the life of the mind and those who want to go hiking, at home or abroad.

Whether they know it or not, these seekers have written the beginning of a romance novel or twelve.  Only they’re not young; they’re on the downhill slope of their lives and they’re still looking for that elusive someone.  Maybe they had it with someone who is now gone, but hope lives on.

Why is beautiful more important than kind and funny?  Is nobody looking for someone who will make you tea when you’re sick, and take out the trash and clean the cat litter?

And why are these listings so sad to read? Is it because they’re fiction?  How many beautiful people do you know?  I’m willing to bet you know more kind, nice, decent, helpful, responsible people that stunners. But admit it:  you kind of like to read about the beautiful (if lovelorn) ones.

 Coming February 4th

Beloved Books

Elizabeth Zelvin

On the mystery e-list DorothyL not long ago, Josephine Tey's Golden Age mystery Brat Farrar became the subject of a prolonged discussion. It's come up more than once before. There's plenty for mystery lovers to say about this book. For example, is it the best of Tey's small output of eight enduring mysteries, or do readers prefer The Daughter of Time or The Franchise Affair? It's on any list of impersonation and inheritance mysteries, another topic DLers turned to recently. It's also a horse mystery. But none of that came up in the latest discussion. These avid readers and re-readers, myself included, were tripping over each other in our eagerness to say, not merely that we loved this book, but that Brat Farrar, both the book and its eponymous protagonist, were beloved. "I love it to pieces," one enthusiast commented.

What makes a book beloved? (And as a writer, don't I wish it could be bottled?) For me, the key is that we fall in love with the characters. As someone pointed out in the discussion I've mentioned, although Brat is committing a crime by impersonating a boy who disappeared for the sake of an inheritance, his reasons for doing so--his loneliness, his hard luck, his yearning to belong--immediately engage our sympathies. He is such an appealing character, so genuinely decent, that we quickly find ourselves rooting for him. And the people among whom he finds himself--except, of course, for the villain--are equally endearing: the kind of family we'd love to have ourselves if we were horse-loving Brits in the English countryside a few decades ago.

That's the first of my top three beloved books. The second is Gaudy Night, the next-to-last and richest of Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. It's the one that has prompted critics to say that Sayers actually fell in love with her protagonist. To tell the truth, I don't see what's so bad about that. Lord Peter, who started out in the early novels as a flat-character cross between Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster, has developed by Gaudy Night into a startlingly complex character with such a finely tuned sense of honor in relationships that it's no wonder that Harriet Vane, who's been holding out since they met in Strong Poison, throws away her feminist scruples and falls in love with him too.

Harriet Vane herself is the other reason we love Gaudy Night so much. The setting of an Oxford women's college in the Thirties, when intelligent women were forced to choose between scholarship and marriage, appeals to the sensibilities of a twenty-first century woman like me. There's no murder in Gaudy Night, only an increasingly pernicious poisoned pen, a near-suicide, and a couple of assaults. These provide ample grounds for detection and free Sayers to write a multilayered character-driven novel that wins our hearts.

My third beloved book is outside the mystery genre: A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold's cross between space opera and comedy of manners, part of the brilliant Vorkosigan saga. Bujold dedicates it to "Jane, Charlotte, Dorothy, and Georgette"--the Brontes, Sayers herself, and Heyer, an author of Golden Age mysteries herself along with her lighthearted and durable Regency romances. Like Gaudy Night, it's a novel of courtship between two complex and endearing characters. There are some subplots of mind-boggling brilliance, dazzlingly imaginative world-building that provides a context for ideas and issues that are relevant to the present-day reader, and a cast of characters, Miles Vorkosigan's family and friends, whom I for one would be thrilled to take home with me. A bonus: the book is hilarious--laugh-out-loud funny--even on repeated re-readings.

It's official: Animals have personalities!

by Sandra Parshall

Anybody who has lived with animals and observed them closely knows they are individuals with distinct personalities. But to science, that is "anecdotal" information, tainted by emotion -- anthropomorphism -- and proof of nothing. It’s nice, then, that researchers are now doing scientifically conducted studies of animal personalities.

Virginia Morrell reports on these studies in an article in the February issue of Psychology Today. Morrell points out that until only a few years ago scientists in general ridiculed the notion that nonhuman animals had personalities. When the great primatologist Jane Goodall discussed the individual temperaments and personalities of the chimpanzees she observed, she was criticized for her unscientific approach. Goodall also expressed the belief that chimps experienced – gasp! – emotions. Imagine such a thing!

Graybeard male chimp at San Francisco Zoo, listening
attentively as I talked to him.

If you live with a cat or a dog or both, you’re rolling your eyes by now. Of course they have personalities. Of course they feel emotion. (How many of us have seen surviving pets grieve to the point of illness following the death of a companion?) Pets  aren’t reflecting what their owners project onto them. Every truly caring pet owner allows an animal to be itself. We can mistreat them and force them into doing things they don't want to do, into hiding their true natures, but relief from a bad situation will almost always bring a cat's or dog’s natural personality back to the surface.

The two cats that share our home couldn’t be more different. Gabriel, an Abyssinian, is forward, friendly toward everyone, a greeter at the door. Emma dashes for cover when the doorbell rings, and although women don’t frighten her the way men do, she’s likely to stay hidden until any intruder departs. Gabriel is compliant about such things as claw-clipping and medication. Emma is a holy terror. Yet they live in the same house and receive equal attention and love. They are what they are, not what we have made them.

Mammals aren’t the only animals with distinct personal natures. Such diverse creatures as octopuses, crabs, fish and insects have demonstrated individual differences in the way they respond to the world. But despite evidence presented occasionally by reputable researchers such as Goodall, scientists were reluctant until recently to admit that nonhumans could possess the same traits we see in our own species. This branch of animal studies didn’t really take off until the late 1990s. Now it’s turning up fascinating information about the other living beings that share our world.

Not surprisingly, researchers have confirmed that humans share many traits with our primate cousins, but some differences have also been found. For example, chimpanzees – who live in families and complex communities as humans do – also possess what is called the “conscientiousness factor,” which involves the ability to plan and to behave in predictable ways that contribute to social order. However, the largely solitary orangutan lacks this trait. Humans differ from all other primates in the way we compete for and display dominance – at least in civilized societies.

Across many different species, researchers have found that an agreeable personality with a low level of neuroticism is directly tied to a strong immune system and a longer life. This is equally true of humans, monkeys, great apes, house cats, and probably demonstrates a genetic link between health and personality. (Yes, we all know mean dogs and nasty humans who have lived into old age, but we're talking majorities and generalities here.)

Now that science has finally recognized the possibility that other animals have personalities, just as humans do, maybe we can move toward a recognition that they also have some of the same rights we have. 

Parting Words

Sharon Wildwind

I've thought a lot in the past few weeks about how to condense seven years of Daughters' blogs. Was there one thing I learned from all of you? I think this is it.

It has been such a privilege to share thoughts on writing with you. All the best to each one of you. I hope we run into each other in some other writing space.

If you'd like a .jpg image to use as a screensaver or print or something, go here to download the image.

A great big hug to all of you,

Sharon

Saving Mr. Banks and The Writer's Love for a Character

by Julia Buckley

My sister treated me to a showing of SAVING MR. BANKS this past weekend, and I loved the movie.  I am continuing to ponder a couple of themes that relate specifically to writers, since the premise of the film was that P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, was reluctant to give up the rights to Walt Disney, who ultimately made the film which starred Julie Andrews.  Two things came to the forefront in the film: that writers love their characters "like family," and that one's intellectual property is, when it comes down to it, one's most precious possession.

Every writer might dream of seeing his or her work on the big screen, but along with that dream would go the dread that something might go wrong. The ill-fated movie V.I. Warshawski did no justice to Sara Paretsky's elegant and exciting novels, but crammed the books' plots together in a way that was not satisfying to her loyal readers. Sue Grafton has famously refused to ever let Kinsey Millhone become a character on the screen, and has told her children that they may not allow it, either.

It's not a surprise that writers are fiercely loyal to their characters. First of all, these literary people are born from the author's mind, as Athena sprang from the head of Zeus. JK Rowling says that Harry Potter was fully formed when he came to her, and on her website she writes that "I had never been so excited about an idea before." And there's the crux of the matter: writers fall in love with the act of creation, which is itself a mystery, and each character becomes a new love affair.  To betray that character is to betray a loved one, which is the dilemma of P.L. Travers in the movie.  Walt Disney even says he understands, since he once faced the same conundrum with Mickey Mouse.

So why sell out at all?  Well--for money. Writers struggle just as all artists struggle. Everyone knows that JK Rowling is the exception, not the rule, and even she couldn't have anticipated just how well Harry would do in the literary world.  In the case of P.L. Travers, she muses "I would like to keep my house," as a reason that she might consider going to the dreaded Los Angeles to meet with people she is sure she will not like.

But I think many writers would agree that the dream of money is only a dream which would allow them to write in peace (and perhaps luxury) for the rest of their lives.  Writers like to write, and the world often doesn't want to let them do so, since the world demands that people work to pay their bills.

Walt Disney, as portrayed by Tom Hanks, is weirdly benevolent and never angry, which I don't believe for a second,  and of course P.L. Travers is represented as an odd crank who needs to just get along. Luckily Emma Thompson gives her dimension, which makes the film a moving examination of the writer/producer relationship.

Hollywood may be the dream that many writers have for their novels today, but I doubt much has changed in the way authors feel about their characters. Those people on the page are intimately known to their creators, and their creators won't entrust them to just anyone lightly.

Poe's Deadly Daughters to Say Goodbye on Poe's Birthday

After seven years of stimulating and enjoyable dialogue with each other and you, our readers, Poe's Deadly Daughters have decided to stop writing the blog and devote our attention to our many other projects. We published our first post on Poe's 198th birthday, January 19, 2007, having chosen our name to honor the father of the detective story.

On our first anniversary, we wrote, "What a year it's been!" Of the founding Daughters who have stuck around to post a new piece weekly for the whole seven years, Sandy won an Agatha for Best First Novel, Julia and Liz published their first short stories in anthologies, and the third book in Sharon's series came out. We were named "one of eight top mystery blogs" in Library Journal and praised as "schmooze-worthy" by J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet and January Magazine. "Most of all," we wrote, "we've had fun!"

We've never stopped having fun, and the pleasure of interacting with our readers has played an enormous part in that. But as 21st-century life gets more and more hectic, reading a favorite blog daily or even weekly has become harder for even the most devoted followers. And writing a 500-800 word post that's entertaining, informative, and polished every week for seven years--well, do the math: 52 x 7 = 364 posts from each of us. And 364 x 700 words (let's be conservative and use an estimated average) = 254,800 words per blogger, or the equivalent of 3½ novels apiece.

We've also interviewed a host of mystery luminaries and welcomed a dazzling array of guest bloggers, far too many to name but ranging from bestsellers to debut authors. For several years, Sharon hosted a Canadian mystery author every month. All those posts, along with ours, will remain available to all in our archives.

Please don't quit now, because we'll still be here till January 19th, Poe's 205th birthday, for another two rounds of blogging, including guest posts from our Deadly Daughters emerita. Here's the full roster of blog sisters, past and present:

Julia Buckley
Sharon Wildwind
Sandra Parshall
Elizabeth Zelvin
Sheila Connolly
Jeri Westerson
Darlene Ryan (aka Sofie Kelly)
Lonnie Cruse

Before we say goodbye, we'll give you full information about our other projects and links to our websites, books, and, in some cases, blogs to which we'll still be contributing. All that information will remain visible when you click on http://poesdeadlydaughters.blogspot.com

It's been fun!

Vacations

by Sheila Connolly

Earlier this week the top headline (above the fold on the front page) in the Boston Globe read, “For majority of workers, vacation days go unused.”

I laughed.  What’s a vacation?

All right, I’ll admit that I actually took a vacation this year—two weeks in Italy.  But I felt so guilty that I had to write a book about it (Reunion with Death, released in November).

I also spent two weeks in Ireland recently—but that was work.

I love my work! I don't need—or want—a vacation, because it feels like my entire life is a vacation.

When I started writing, I had just been fired from what I thought was the perfect job. I was angry and hurt, so I said something like “I’ll show them,” and I started writing. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I had something to prove, and I knew I had started late, so I was trying to catch up. In the end I spewed out roughly a million words before I slowed down. Okay, maybe a lot of them were not good words—the writing was sloppy, the plots were weak, and I kind of dwelt on dark crimes. Yes, now I write cozies, so I must have gotten all that anger out of my system. I also learned a lot about writing along the way.

And I loved it.  Once I’d purged that bile, I wanted to keep going. I never went back to a day job, so I had something else to prove:  that I might be able to make a living with writing.  Took a while (close to ten years), but it finally worked out.  Beginners, do not try this without an outside income source! Partner, trust fund, lottery win—all will do just fine.

Nowadays I have found that almost everything I do feeds into my writing.  I can’t go to a store without watching other people and wondering, what if they were planning a crime? What secrets do they have? I can’t admire a pretty landscape without looking for places to hide a body, or picturing a corpse washing ashore. Everything becomes fodder for some future book (the ex-government administrative employee who is now raising alpacas on a farm in western Massachusetts is definitely going to show up—I met her at a tag sale). 

 

The trip to Ireland was certainly work:  I talked to quite a few pub owners and employees, including the woman who owns what used to be the pub that is the model for Sullivan’s in my County Cork books. I got an impromptu lesson on Irish whiskey from a liquor distributor who also happened to be the evening’s entertainment at a Dublin pub. I talked to one bar maid who wants to go back to school to become a forensic analyst, and a nice young man who was planning to go abroad to teach English as a second language. I talked to yet another pub owner about the food service regulations imposed on establishments by the European Union.

In the past I’ve traveled just to see things, and I loved it then. Now I “see” things through a different lens, and it’s still wonderful.  Plus writing gives me a reason to go places and talk to people, which is always a good thing since being a writer means spending a lot of time glued to a chair in front of a keyboard and talking to the cats.

I love being a writer.

 Coming February 4th!

 

Another New Year

Elizabeth Zelvin

This year, 2014, will mark 69 years since the end of World War II; 51 years since Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique; 46 since Dr. King's assassination; 45 since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, 42 since the founding of Ms. Magazine, 28 since the Challenger disaster, 13 since 911, and 6 since the election of the first African-American President of the United States.

It's the year in which I'll turn 70, nowadays considered the new 39 but more traditionally the threshold of old age, the year at which we need to remember we must die, according to British novelist Muriel Spark, author of Memento Mori. This year, I'll attend my 50th college reunion and a Girl Scout camp reunion celebrating an aspect of my childhood that helped shape who I am from my first experience 61 years ago. I'll celebrate 10 years as a mystery writer, 30 as a psychotherapist, 33 years of marriage (my second), and 38 from when my husband and I first started dating. I'll have lived in my New York City apartment building for 47 years and my current apartment for 44, which, not coincidentally, is the age my son will reach this year.

My granddaughters will turn 10 and 7, moving all too quickly from little-girlhood toward preteen status. This may be the year that someone, perhaps another child, challenges their belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. The older one is already a delight to have a serious conversation with, and the little one recently complained that her first-grade homework is too easy.

This year, my husband and I will celebrate my birthday by traveling, visiting Europe for the first time in ten years. We're spending a week each in Amsterdam and Toulouse, both places where we're lucky to have friends lending us their apartments. I've always dreamed of seeing tulip season in the Netherlands, so that's high on our agenda. I'm also looking forward to the superb museums. The Rijksmuseum has recently reopened after a renovation that was already in progress when we were there a decade ago. In Toulouse, we plan to settle in and do a minimum of touring. We'll be staying within walking distance of some of the city's beautiful rose-brick medieval churches. There'll be cafés to sit in and markets to shop in. My stepdaughter and her husband, who live in London, will come and visit for a few days.

On the writing front, after managing to stay afloat on the turbulent seas of the publishing industry for the six years since my first novel came out, I hope to do reasonably well with Voyage of Strangers, my novel about what really happened when Columbus discovered America. I released it last month as an e-book after 150 tries and near-misses, so I can say I left no stone unturned in my hunt for an agent or publisher willing to take a chance on a historical novel that's not a mystery, though it's the sequel to two short stories that appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and not in one of the hot young-adult genres, though its main characters are in their teens. The protagonist is Diego, the young marrano sailor from the Agatha-nominated story "The Green Cross." It takes place on Columbus's second voyage, a period marked by the aftermath of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the genocide of the Taino in the Caribbean. Diego and his sister Rachel (a new character I hope my readers will fall in love with, as I did) struggle with divided loyalties as they come of age in a doomed paradise.

Discover this book!

by Sandra Parshall

Book bloggers and publishing analysts all over the internet are busily telling us this week what a crazy year 2013 was.

Major publishers that were anguishing not too long ago about ebooks putting them out of business are making lots and lots of money – from ebooks.

The writers who started the self-publishing boom often found their books  being pushed aside by digital versions of print bestsellers, as readers decided they were willing to pay higher prices after all for ebooks by their longtime favorites. But digital prices have been up and down for months and nobody seems to know what the most enticing figure is. Even free doesn’t satisfy some readers. Give them a free short story and they’ll post a nasty “review” complaining that it isn’t a full-length novel.

Print hasn’t gone away, but the weekly sales reports in Publishers Weekly aren’t encouraging. Juvenile nonfiction and board books for kids are the only formats not losing sales, and mass market paperbacks continue to take the biggest hit – down another 9% for the year, after staggering losses in the preceding years.

But writers, traditionally published and self-published, keep writing. We hear a lot about search engine optimization and metadata and careful selection of keywords, all of it adding up to discoverability. That doesn’t even sound like it should be a word, but it’s the concept that rules writers’ lives in the internet era. Readers have to be able to discover our books. And most of the responsibility for that falls directly on the authors.

We end up shouting with joy: “I have a new book coming out!”

...and simultaneously moaning with dread: “I have a new book coming out.”

Once people start reading it, and saying nice things about it, the dread fades and the satisfaction of accomplishment returns, but still we know that success or failure depends on our ability to get the word out, to help readers discover the story we’ve worked on for such a long time.

So... Guess what?

I have a new book coming out!

If you’re my friend on Facebook, you’ve no doubt heard about it already, but let me tell you again. Poisoned Ground is number 6 in the Rachel Goddard series. She’s now married to Tom Bridger, the recently elected sheriff of Mason County, Virginia. Rachel is close to her sister Michelle again. Life couldn’t be much better.

Then a big predatory development company decides to build a sprawling mountain resort in little Mason County, and company reps promise jobs galore and plenty of money pouring into a place that badly needs it. The only problem is that the company wants to build its resort on the McKendrick Horse Farm, owned by Rachel’s good friend Joanna, and the smaller properties that border it. Joanna and some of her neighbors have no intention of giving up their land. When an elderly husband and wife are gunned down on the farm they refused to sell, a small-scale civil war erupts in the county. If you know Rachel, you know she’s right in the middle of it.

The violence escalates – but is it all due to disagreement over the resort plans? Or has the development issue only served to stir up old enmities, open deep wounds and bring back memories of betrayal that have lain dormant in the poisoned ground beneath Mason County’s bucolic surface?

Poisoned Ground has some new characters I enjoyed writing and hope you’ll find entertaining – especially the eccentric Jones sisters, three unmarried women of a certain age named Winter, Spring, and Summer. A fourth sister named Autumn is no more than a photo on the mantel and a sad memory...

Poisoned Ground comes out March 4. I hope you’ll discover it.

Happy new year from all of Poe's Deadly Daughters!