New Kid on the Block

by Sheila Connolly


Poe’s Deadly Daughters are delighted to welcome Sheila Connolly as our new blog sister. Sheila is the author of the Orchard Mysteries, the forthcoming Museum Mystery series, and, as Sarah Atwell, the Glassblowing Mystery series, all from Berkley Prime Crime. Her debut novel as Sarah Atwell was nominated for an Agatha award for Best First Novel. The new Orchard Mystery, Red Delicious Death, is due out in March. Sheila has been an art historian, an investment banker, a non-profit fundraiser, and a professional genealogist as well as a mystery writer. Welcome, Sheila! We hope you’ll find being a Deadly Daughter as rewarding as any of your other “hats.”

Starting in February, Sheila will be blogging on the fourth weekend of every month. Liz Zelvin will continue to blog on Thursdays (except for today).



I am delighted that the writers of Poe's Deadly Daughters have invited me to join them.



That makes me the New Kid–again. Being the new kid is something I have a lot of experience with, because my family moved around a lot when I was young. No, my father was not in the military, but he frequently became impatient with jobs and bosses (like the one at duPont who told him he wasn't a big enough fish at the company to drive a Buick), and since his area of specialization–fluid mixing systems–was in demand, he could always find a new job. I don't even remember the early moves (at age one and three), but I can definitely recall the ones in pre-school, kindergarten, fourth grade and eighth grade.


As an adult, I've added a lot more moves: going off to college, then graduate school; getting married and moving to North Carolina, then California, Pennsylvania, and finally to Massachusetts. In all these places I held a variety of jobs, short- and long-term, and for a time I went back to school. As a result, I was always walking into new situations, meeting new people.


It's never easy, especially if you're not a gregarious person, which I am not. I was the shy kid but I was also the brainy one in any class. But I made friends and did well in school, and survived it all. Maybe it made me a stronger person, but that doesn't mean I liked it.


Only recently did I realize that I've become part of yet another group, thanks in large part to the Internet: the writers community. This time the entry was almost painless. I feel like I have a lot of friends, some of whom I've never met face to face and possibly never will. But in cyberspace we all share our triumphs and our disappointments, and even a lot about our lives–we "know" each other. And if you go to writers conferences you will see clusters of people gleefully greeting each other, trying to cram a whole lot of friendship into a very short time.


And there's one more community I hadn't even thought of until now. When we moved to our current house, we built in a wall of bookshelves in one room, and for the first time in many, many years, my husband and I had the space to unpack all our books. We'd been collecting mysteries since we first married, back in the Dark Ages when there was no Internet and no Amazon and you had to seek out second-hand bookstores and hunt for paper copies of the books you wanted. And we collected series–too many to mention, but you can safely assume I have all the classic mystery writers, in complete sets. Yes, I read them all, but the collecting part was fun too. The result, however, was a lot of linear feet of books, which for a long time had no place to go.


Here we finally unpacked them all and lined them up on the shelves (which quickly overflowed, but that's another story). But what hit me when I started writing this post was: I have my own little piece of shelf now, something I never expected when I started collecting mysteries. Five books of my own (plus large-print copies) have joined all the great names on my shelves. I'm up there next to my idols–Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and more. I'm the New Kid on the bookshelf block–and I like it!

Muddled, Mushy, Marvelous Middle

Here I am at book #3 in my Vietnam veterans mystery series. Soldier on the Porch hits the ground running tomorrow. At least it hits the library mailing lists. My publisher, Five Star, vends primarily to libraries, so they devote the first three to four weeks after the release date to mailing copies to libraries that have already ordered the book.

But I already have had the Advanced Reading Copies—the ARCs—in my hot little hand, so it seems like a real book to me. How it feels to be in the middle of a series?

Muddled, for a start. Not the writing itself; there I see an improvement in each book. It’s the muddle-headedness of publishing and marketing in general. About five years ago, another writer commented that those of us who would publishing between 2000 and 2025 would be the vanguard for a new way of thinking about books; that we might be the last generation of writers who distributed and marketed books in the traditional way.

As it’s played out so far, authors are far outstripping publishing and distribution in leaving the old ways behind. Web sites are passe (but you still need one), blogs are overloaded (but you still need one), and authors have moved into podcasts and video book trailers as a matter of course. Unfortunately, distributions systems are still stuck in the early 20th century. We can get the word out about our books, but we can’t get the books themselves out. The old systems are crashing and the new systems are not in place to replace them.

Next I feel mushy. Contrary to common belief, selling your first book isn’t the key point in a writer’s career. It’s selling the fourth book, and so far, book #4 in my series has not sold. In mysteries, the series has been the absolute king for years. Cracks are appearing. Many writers—including me—are intentionally limiting their series. For example, I knew going into it, that it would be five books in total. One very successful writer recently said in an essay on publishing that well-established mystery writers are beginning to go for stand-alones because one book is all they can expect to place with any publisher.

Even though #4 hasn’t sold, I decided to write it anyway. I need to finish this series and have it on the shelf. And, I have a stand-alone in the planning stage, just to cover all my bets.

Finally, I feel marvelous. I’m really, really doing this. Maybe not as well as I’d hoped, but as well as I can, and I’m having a great time. I’ve made tons of acquaintances in the mystery community. I’m a part of critique groups. I know far more about the business end than I want to, or than anyone sane person should have to contend with, but basically, being in the middle is a great place to be.
-----------
Writing quote for the week (and blatant self-promotion to boot):

First, the book Soldier on the Porch by Sharon Wildwind was great!! I got nothing done around the house because I didn't want to put the book down. This is the third in the Elizabeth Pepperhawk (Pepper) series. Pepper was a nurse in Vietnam (and so was Sharon) and the series is set after she returns to civilian life. You can check out the books and more about Sharon at www.wildwindauthor.com. For those of us who were adults during the Vietnam War, the books bring back a lot of memories -- and remind us that once the war is over, there is more work to be done in bringing those who were part of the fighting back into families and friendships with the understanding that we can never know what they went through. I would assume that many of the returnees from Iraq will have the same issues. Hopefully books like this can help us understand just a little. But please don't get the idea that this is a book only filled with angst -- it's not. There are flashes of humor and the mystery is excellent. I thought I had the thing figured out -- no way. There are two prior books in the series
Some Welcome Home and First Murder in Advent.

~Deborah Andolino, Aliens & Alibis Books, Columbia, SC