Ghosts, Goblins, and Vampires. Oh my!

by guest blogger Krista Davis

Halloween is in the air. No longer just the domain of children, the bewitching holiday overcomes normally sensible adults, suddenly possessing them to wear costumes to work and to transform the fronts of their homes into graveyards. I confess that I’m partial to wearing cat ears and painting whiskers on my cheeks.

My most recent release, THE DIVA HAUNTS THE HOUSE, has a Halloween theme. As you can imagine, Halloween is the perfect time for a mystery. Candles, costumes, howling winds, and dry leaves rustling along the street make it a natural for spookiness.

Ghosts and goblins, or in my case, ghosts and vampires, make appearances in the book. My protagonist, Sophie Winston, finds herself with twelve-year-old houseguests who believe in ghosts and vampires. To set their fears to rest, she tries to reason with them. However Sophie is in the role of an aunt, not a parent who is used to dealing with children’s imaginations, and she quickly finds herself wondering where she should draw the line.

That led me to question my own beliefs. What would I say to a couple of scared pre-teens? After all, it’s fun to believe in spooks one night a year. What about all those vampire books and movies that are so popular? Do kids think they’re real? Is it fair to dampen their desire to suspend reality and believe in the undead?

Complicating matters, Sophie suspects that she has a ghost living in her kitchen. She and her ex-husband inherited the house from his aunt, and Sophie’s former mother-in-law drops in occasionally to chat with her deceased sister. So Sophie (and I) had to think about this dilemma. Is it fair to say there are ghosts but not vampires?

You may think neither one exists. Fair enough. I didn’t either at one point. As a child, I had plenty of Halloween fun, but I was never really afraid because I didn’t think ghosts were real. One of my best friends was the daughter of a local undertaker. Their home over top of the funeral home was warm and friendly, and not the least bit ghostly. Of course, that didn’t prevent her father from teasing us by saying we could have the candy bars in his desk drawer if we dared to venture downstairs to get them. Oh, the squealing and screeching! We scrambled back up the stairs faster than we ever moved in our gym classes. It was all in fun, and we knew that.

So I find it a bit odd that I am more open to believing in ghosts as an adult than I was as a child. Have I seen one? Maybe. Or maybe it was a trick of the mind. I have, however, experienced my share of quirky moments and unexplained events that give me pause. Some of my friends and relatives have admitted to equally peculiar occurrences. For the time being, I’m on the fence. After all, it’s just plain fun to believe in ghosts and otherworldly creatures on Halloween!

What about you? Do you believe in ghosts or vampires?

Krista Davis is the author of the Domestic Diva Mysteries. Her first book, THE DIVA RUNS OUT OF THYME, was nominated for an Agatha award. Her most recent release, THE DIVA HAUNTS THE HOUSE, inched up to number 27 on the The New York Times Bestseller List. Visit Krista at her website http://divamysteries.com or at Mystery Lover’s Kitchen http://mysteryloverskitchen.com .

It Ain't Me, Babe

by guest blogger Julia Williams, bookseller extraordinaire and offspring of Sheila Connolly, for reasons which will shortly become clear.

Hello, internet world! I’m guesting today for my mother, Sheila Connolly, as a broken ankle and general post-conference brain-friedness prevent her from coherent typing. The doctors told her to stay away from keyboards for at least a week, but you know how she is. She continues to claw at the laptop as I write this, attempting to wrest back her sacred blogging duty, but I’ll have none of it. I think she’ll pull through. In the meantime, you’ve got me. You can call me Julie.

In case you hadn’t heard, though I’m guessing you had, this past week saw mystery writers and readers and lovers of all stripes convene for Malice Domestic 23 in sunny Bethesda, Maryland. Actually, I’ve just asked my mother if it was in fact sunny there, and she reports that she didn’t see any windows, just the inside of the conference hotel. So it might have been sunny. I’ll speak with the fact-checking department and get back to you. With the grownups gone off to points south, it was my job to hold down the fort here in Massachusetts, and while I am generally a nervous person where creaky Victorian houses are concerned, I hardly found time to be frightened, between working sixty hours a week and my very important commitments to Monday night pub trivia and constant attention to Bravo reality programming. Besides, any time I wondered what the folks might be up to, I had only to log onto Facebook, where Malice photos soon began popping up in my feed like crocuses on the neighbors’ lawns. There was my mother, chatting variously with Liz Zelvin and Krista Davis (both of whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year at the Virginia Festival of the book — small world!), and snaps here and there of another Facebook friend, the talented and eternally chic Hank Phillippi Ryan. It looks like everyone had a good time! There is something marvelous about writers’ conferences, isn’t there? You never can tell what’s going to happen.

This puts me in mind of the first conference I can recall attending. It wasn’t strictly a conference for writers, but it was an academic event at which thinkers presented their work and looked to foster dialogue within their field of study. I was in my first year of college, and drove down from school with a few other students to meet up with a professor whose history class we were all taking at the time. One morning, our group arrived late from the local bed and breakfast and sat in the back of a large conference room for the first talk of the day. After a long presentation on atrocities in Europe during the past century, we all slumped in our chairs and looked at our shoes as the audience began to file out. A tiny woman in her eighties shuffled up the aisle toward the exit, but stopped when she saw us. She patted my friend on the shoulder, said “Cheer up, dear,” and walked on. We all chuckled, felt the mood lighten a bit, and left for a late breakfast. We only discovered the next day, at the conference’s keynote reading, that the woman had been the great writer and poet Grace Paley.

Which describes perfectly what I love about conferences. You may hardly know what’s happening outside the hotel walls, but the excitement of the conversations and connections going on inside make you forget to care. Be it in Atlanta or Austin or Boston or Bruges, the simple aggregation of creative types in one place with one focus makes for an interesting time. Did you ever put some beetles in a jar when you were a kid, and then shake up the jar to make them fight? No, I didn’t either. That would be cruel. Don’t do that. But you get my point. Conferences are a great time once a year (or twice, or many times, depending on how you feel about travel) to recharge your creative batteries, to get excited about your craft, and, heck why not, schmooze with the writing community over tiny quiches and wine. What did you all get up to at Malice this year, if you went? Do tell.

Thanks for reading, cats and kittens. You’ll get Sheila back next week, I promise. Over and out!

Murder for Christmas?

by guest blogger Krista Davis

Some people might think it’s peculiar to write about a murder that takes place around the holidays. After all, it’s the hap-hap-happiest time of year. I love Christmas. The decorating, and shopping, and baking -- the whole thing. I even like stringing lights outside with fingers stiff from the cold. I look forward to feasting on roast goose with friends and family and curling up by the fireplace with hot chocolate and a good mystery.


As we grow up the joys and disappointments of the holidays no longer come from the packages under the tree. They move up to a bigger and less predictable source, the behavior of our families and friends. We look forward to the warmth and pleasures of family, but we dread dealing with the mother who drinks too much or the husband who is having an affair. Competent, respected adults shudder at the thought of the holidays with a parent so critical that they’re reduced to insecure, angry adolescents again. How does one cope with a parent who says not to come home unless the daughter has lost weight?


Earlier this year I was walking along a street in Charlottesville, Virginia with Liz Zelvin. She told me (and I hope I’m paraphrasing you correctly, Liz) that one of the first things her clients have to learn is that they can’t control other people. I think it can take a long time for us to reach the point where we understand that. We can’t make someone love us, or force them to stop drinking, or lecture them to a size two. All those things have to come from within the other person.


Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop us from trying. For some reason, the holidays seem to amplify our expectations of perfection. None of those problems are new. The husband’s affair, the mother’s drinking, the poor relationship between mother and daughter all existed long before the holidays, perhaps for years. Yet we still expect people to be the way we wish they were when it comes to the holidays.


Add the stress of finding this year’s must-have toy, sewing a costume for a pageant, baking cookies for the office cookie swap, attending boring parties with a spouse, cursing at tangled lights, and dealing with a turkey everyone forgot to thaw, and it’s amazing that there aren’t more yuletide murders. Of course, mystery writers love the combination of unrealistic expectations and stress!


In The Diva Cooks A Goose, domestic diva Sophie Winston has a chance to relax because her brother and sister-in-law, Lacy, are hosting the big family celebration. Lacy is a perfectionist, the type who makes lists for everything. She planned ahead and has everything under control until Christmas Eve, when the Christmas presents are stolen right out from under the tree. Poor Lacy. That’s only the beginning of holiday disasters for her family. When her newly separated father arrives with a date, more than one person is ready to commit a merry murder. While Lacy copes with parents she can’t control, Sophie is on the trail of a killer, and when she finds him, she plans to cook his goose!

I wish you and yours a warm and loving holiday season. May your celebrations be festive and may the only murders be properly confined to spellbinding mysteries.

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Krista Davis writes the Domestic Diva Mystery series for Berkley Prime Crime. The first book in the series, THE DIVA RUNS OUT OF THYME, was nominated for an Agatha Award. Her most recent book, THE DIVA COOKS A GOOSE, launches on December 7th!

Chipping Away the Stone

Elizabeth Zelvin

Everybody knows that Michelangelo, widely accepted as the greatest sculptor ever, explained how he created his magnificent marble statues, including the David and the Pietà, by chipping away the stone until only the form imprisoned within remained. Writers, at least those who know that every first draft needs some revision, go through a similar process. Instead of quarrying the raw material, they create it by putting words together in a form determined by the mysterious process we call creativity. In fact, what writers initially do with words is much like what sculptors in clay do: building up one small bit at a time until a rough form is achieved.

After that, how sculptors revise a clay figure is a combination of of building, removing, and smoothing. We could say that writers do that too. But recently, after many years of writing, I think I’ve reached a new level of ability to critique my own work, and it feels more like chipping away the stone to reveal the story pared down to its essence, containing not one wasted word. At least, that’s the goal. Not being Michelangelo, I never achieve perfection. But the process feels much the same.

When I first joined Sisters in Crime’s Guppies chapter with the first draft of Death Will Get You Sober burning a hole in my computer, among the first pieces of advice I heard were these:
Don’t query agents or editors with a first draft.
Join a critique group.
Kill your darlings.
If I had followed all these dicta immediately, I might have sold my first mystery a lot sooner than I did. Or maybe it was meant to take the time it took to learn by my mistakes.

I was so excited about my manuscript that I couldn’t wait to send it out, so I experienced many rejections—and got many good suggestions—before it got published in a form far different from that original first draft. I did join a critique group, but it was the wrong one for me. I knew it when the elderly lady in the group told me my subject matter was “sordid.” (On the other hand, another member was the wonderful Krista Davis, who is a friend and critique partner to this day.) And I understood what “kill your darlings” meant. But for a long time, I couldn’t do it. Every clever phrase and carefully chosen word was so precious to me. How could I take any of them out, even in the interest of a tighter story? And not only my attachment to them, but also the fear that my creative well might run dry at any moment, prevented me from revising as ruthlessly as the material needed.

I know exactly when the shift took place. In 2006, I had the honor of being selected for a three-week residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, FL, working with master artist SJ Rozan. SJ both chose the participants and ran the workshop brilliantly, and it was a powerful experience. I learned a lot from the other writers. But SJ provided the moment of truth, some time during the second week, when she said, “Liz, you need to give us less, not more. Two clever lines in a paragraph are enough—three or four are too many.”

I went back to my room and took another look at the manuscript I was presenting to the group. (We “workshopped” three of the first four chapters of Death Will Help You Leave Him, the upcoming second book in my series.) For the first time in the 57 years I’ve been writing, what I needed to cut leaped off the page before my eyes. I could suddenly see the difference between the shape of the story and the bits of literary marble I could chip away. This new ability has stayed with me. In recent weeks, I’ve written two short stories. They’re a departure for me in that they’re not whodunits about Bruce, my series protagonist. In both cases, I envisioned the whole story, final twist and all, before beginning to write. So I was quite pleased with my first draft in both cases. But as soon as I printed them out and began to read them over, the marble chips began to fly around. So I grabbed a pen—and greatly improved the stories.

To Blog Or Not To Blog

by Krista Davis

* Winner! Winner of Krista's new book, The Diva Runs Out of Thyme is Pat G. Pat, send me your mailing address (darlene at darleneryan.com) and we'll get it in the mail to you. Thanks for visiting, Krista.)

Krista Davis is the author of The Diva Runs out of Thyme, the first in a new series, available this coming Tuesday.

I confess that I have been remarkably slow to come to blogging. Websites make sense to me. Websites are like store windows, except the wind isn’t blowing snow in my face and my legs aren’t exhausted from running all over town.

But blogs. Oof. Posting every day. I had visions of spending more time on the blog than on my next book. However, I recently listened to a lecture by attorney Richard Levick that gave me pause and forced me to reconsider my thoughts about blogging.

The lecture was actually about crisis management in big companies but he emphasized blogging in a way that I hadn’t considered. He pointed out that the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal was driven by a blogger. Indeed, we all know the name Matt Drudge now. News organizations hounded his
blog for updates on the Lewinsky matter. It wasn’t a bigwig reporter who kept that story going -- it was a blogger. And that changed our world in more ways than one. Today, television news networks haunt the blogosphere, looking for news. Bloggers are actually a source of news!

Big multinational corporations are beginning to blog and sell themselves through social networking. Blogging has become such a powerful marketing tool that even the big guys are jumping on board. Did you know that publishers send boxes of books to influential bloggers? Did you know that there are perfume blogs and that some perfume companies, unnerved by the influence of perfume blogs, are beginning to invite bloggers to press events?

The number of people reading blogs is staggering. There are several interesting surveys, with all sorts of stats, but the bottom line is that blog readers number in the millions. What that means to us is that for once, we don’t have to pay for marketing. We can do the same things that big companies are doing. There is no ridiculously unaffordable fee and anyone can play -- the internet is fast becoming the great equalizer. Of course the field is crowded with blogs, but
standing out from the pack is another topic.

Elisa Camahort Page, cofounder of BlogHer, likens the blogosphere to the kitchen table, where we can sit down and converse about the things that matter to us. I love that analogy. How many times did you type a couple of keywords into a search engine yesterday? So did millions of other people. Millions.

A blog is an opportunity to reach out to consumers in a manner that’s shaking up corporate marketing. Even if a person hits on your blog only once, that’s one more bit of exposure for your book.

Corporate America has realized that the future of marketing lies in the internet and more specifically in the blogosphere. If you’ve been balking about blogging, it might be time to make use of this tool -- it’s free and it’s right at your fingertips.

(Ask a question, share your blogging experiences, or just say "Hello" in comments and you could win a copy of The Diva Runs Out of Thyme. Check back Sunday night to see if you've won.)