A Simple Writer's Life

By Vicki Delany

“Writing is a lousy way to make a living but a wonderful way to make a life.” --Jeffrey Siger

I came across that quote by Jeffrey just the other day, in a blog post he wrote for the Poisoned Pen Press Author’s Blog. And it started me thinking.

Fame and (certainly) fortune might have eluded me in my writing career, but I am richer in friends and in experiences because of it.

When I decided I wanted to be a writer, about the last reason was so I’d make new friends, but that turned out to be the best part. Crime writers are (mostly) wonderful, interesting people, and the Canadian crime writing community is close and warm and supportive.

Beyond our borders I’ve been lucky to meet and make friends with countless other writers.

I was at a book event recently with three of my best writer friends and someone asked why we’d do an event together. Weren’t we in competition with each other? No, I don’t think we are. Unlike ‘literary’ writers, who live and die by grants and awards (which only a small number or even just one of them can get), we aren’t in competition. Unlike, say, a house or a car, people don’t usually buy one book. At a multi-author event, people often buy one by each author. Even if they don’t buy everything, they might take a card and get a second author’s book another time. 

Travel goes with friends. Book tours have taken me to some great places I might not otherwise have visited: Hawaii with Deborah Turrell Atkinson, Arizona and California with Donis Casey, North Carolina with Mary Jane Maffini and Elizabeth Duncan, where we were hosted by the incomparable Molly Weston. I look forward all year to the annual road trip down to Bethesda, Maryland for Malice Domestic with a carload of my Canadian buddies such as Erika Chase, R.J. Harlick or Barbara Fradkin. 

Canadian writers Erika Chase, Barbara Fradkin, Vicki Delany, Janet Bolin at Oakmont Festival of Mystery

But all of that costs money.

As the first part of Jeffrey’s sentence says, “a lousy way to make a living.”

I am often asked if I make a living out of this.

In short, no.

I say that I supplement my income. I’ve made sacrifices to be able to have the writing life, but nothing I consider too onerous. I like the simple life out here in the country, and it suits me. 

 
A life of writing, reading, good friends, the occasional travel to interesting places.
   
A wonderful life.

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Vicki Delany’s newest novel is A Cold White Sun, sixth in the critically acclaimed Constable Molly Smith series from Poisoned Pen Press.  She is also the author of the Klondike Gold Rush series and standalone novels of psychological suspense. Having taken early retirement from her job as a systems analyst in the high-pressure financial world, Vicki enjoys the rural life in bucolic, Prince Edward County, Ontario. 
Visit Vicki at http://www.vickidelany.com, www.facebook.com/vicki.delany, and twitter: @vickidelany. She blogs about the writing life at One Woman Crime Wave.

Standalone vs Series

By Vicki Delany

There are, basically, two types of mystery novels: standalones, in which characters appear once, never to be seen again, and series, in which characters feature in book after book.

Some authors like to write standalones, some like to write series books. Me, I can’t decide.

So I do both.

You can’t beat a series for getting to know the characters: the details of their personalities, their quirks, their families and relationships, lovers gained and lost, parents dying, children born. As well as the lives of their families and friends and enemies and the community in which they live.

But when it comes to real personal once-in-a-lifetime drama, you need a standalone.

After all, how many times can one person have a life-changing experience?

A standalone novel gives the protagonist that one opportunity to achieve great things; to have that grand adventure; to meet the everlasting love of their life; to conquer evil, once and for all. In a standalone, the characters face their demons and defeat them. 

Or not. 

My first books were standalone novels of suspense. In Scare the Light Away the main character confronts, for one last time, the debris of her traumatic childhood. In Burden of Memory, the protagonist faces down the ghost of a past that is not hers, but is still threatening what she holds dear.

In a series book, the central character, or characters, confront their demons, but they do not defeat them. Their weaknesses, all their problems, will be back in the next book. In each story the series character stands against, and usually defeats, someone else’s problem or society’s enemy, but she or he moves only one small step towards the resolution of their own issues, if at all.

After the two standalones, I began work on the Constable Molly Smith series. I like that the series format allows me to slowly and gradually explore all of those people’s complicated relationships while at the same time the police are working to find a killer. But series novels present difficulties to the author. The books in a crime series mustn’t flow into each other so much that new readers will be lost as to what’s going on. It can be a balancing act, to create a plot that’s self-contained within each individual book, but still allows the characters to grow and to change over time. To give readers who’ve come into these people’s lives in book five enough information that they know who’s who and a bit of their history, but not so much the long-time reader gets bored at the repetition.

It can be a challenge to keep the main character interesting and growing and changing but to do it so slowly that the reader’s interest in the character can be maintained over several books and several years. I can think of several series that I abandoned because the character kept on doing the same old, same old, and I think of Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks, who’s now in his twentieth book and as fascinating a character as ever. Perhaps realizing that Banks might grow stale, Robinson cleverly introduced a secondary protagonist, Annie Cabot, but Banks still is the heart of the books.

I deliberately made Molly Smith young when the series begins with IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLACIER – she’s twenty-six – hoping to be able to watch her grow as a police officer and as a woman.

After five Molly Smith books, for my newest book, MORE THAN SORROW, I went back to a standalone. All new characters, a new setting, a different style of writing.  MORE THAN SORROW is a contemporary thriller with a historical background, using the dual narrative format – two storylines running throughout that merge at the end.

The protagonist in MORE THAN SORROW is Hannah Manning, once an internationally recognized journalist but now a woman suffering from traumatic brain injury that occurred during an IED explosion in Afghanistan. Hannah is an ‘unreliable narrator’ as her brain injury has left her in pain, confused, lethargic. When she begins experiencing visions of a woman in a long dress emerging from the icy mist of the root cellar, Hannah doesn’t know if the woman is real. Or the product of a damaged brain. And, she wonders, which would be worse?  She finds comfort in the quiet company of Hila Popalzai, an Afghan refugee living on an adjacent farm, a woman also marked by war. When Hila disappears, and Hannah can’t account for her time, not even to herself, old enemies begin to circle.

Hannah would not work as a series protagonist. In MORE THAN SORROW she has to confront her enemies: human as well as her own medical condition.
  
If she fails to defeat them, she will not get a second chance.

Series or standalone? Ultimately it is up to you and me, as readers, to decide.
 
I suspect we’ll vote for both.
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Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most varied and prolific crime writers.  Her popular Constable Molly Smith series (including In the Shadow of the Glacier and Among the Departed) have been optioned for TV by Brightlight Pictures.  She also writes standalone novels of psychological suspense, as well as a light-hearted historical series, (Gold Digger, Gold Mountain), set in the raucous heyday of the Klondike Gold Rush. Vicki’s newest book is More than Sorrow, a standalone novel published by Poisoned Pen Press.  In a starred review, Library Journal called the book, “a splendid Gothic thriller.”

Having taken early retirement from her job as a systems analyst in the high-pressure financial world, Vicki is settling down to the rural life in bucolic Prince Edward County, Ontario where she rarely wears a watch.
Visit Vicki at www.vickidelany.com, www.facebook.com/vicki.delany, and twitter: @vickidelany. She blogs about the writing life at One Woman Crime Wave. 

Vicki Delany Talks about NEGATIVE IMAGE

Interviewed by Sandra Parshall


Vicki Delany is a former systems analyst for a major bank who grew up in Canada, lived in South Africa for eleven years, and now enjoys her peaceful home in rural Prince Edward County, Ontario, where she seldom wears a watch and can write whenever she likes. She is the author of the Constable Molly Smith series, the Klondike Mysteries series, and two standalone suspense novels. Visit her website at http://www.vickidelany.com.

Q. Tell us about your new book, Negative Image.

A. Negative Image is the fourth in the Constable Molly Smith series set in the fictional town of Trafalgar, British Columbia. The book asks: What would you do if you believe the person you trust most in the world betrays you? What would you do if you discovered that the person you trust most in the world believes you capable of betrayal?

When renowned photographer Rudolph Steiner is found murdered, Police Sergeant John Winters learns that his wife is the prime suspect. The former supermodel was the murder victim's lover 25 years earlier, and although his beautiful young wife and photographic assistant have accompanied him to Trafalgar, Steiner lures Eliza Winters to his hotel room just prior to his death. There are other suspects, but when investigators from the RCMP arrive to take over the case they seem to be focused on one suspect only,  Eliza Winters. John Winters is forced into the most difficult decision of his life: loyalty to his job or to his wife. Constable Molly Smith has her own troubles: a series of B&Es has the peaceful town in an uproar, her overprotective Mountie boyfriend is fighting with her colleagues, and a vengeful stalker is watching her every move.

Q. Did you know everything there was to know about your continuing characters when you began the series, or have they surprised you as the series has continued? What have you learned about them – their secrets and pasts – that you didn’t know about at first? For example, did you know from the start that John’s wife Eliza had the secret that’s revealed in Negative Image?

A. I knew most things about John and Molly, but some of the other characters have surprised me. For example, when I sat down to write the scene where John Winters, the detective Sergeant, is introduced in In the Shadow of the Glacier, I had him on a date. He is with a beautiful, sexy woman and has bought her a gift he cannot afford because he is hoping to score. By the time the scene ended they were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary. And I think that works a lot better. Molly Smith’s romantic relationships are in turmoil, so the books need the counterbalance of the Winters’ stable, long-term marriage. I wrote a scene for Valley of the Lost, the second book, in which Eliza is thinking about being married to a cop and that scene brought out things about her past which surprised me. The scene was mostly deleted from Valley of the Lost, but the idea was there to be the plot of Negative Image.

Q. What is it about Molly Smith and John Winters that makes you want to follow them over the course of numerous books? What qualities in these characters appeal to you and intrigue you?

A. As far as I know, Molly Smith is unique in police procedurals as she is young and green and very naïve. She is on probation in the first two books. I did that because first of all I want to explore issues of growing up as a young woman today (I have three daughters in that age group). For example in Negative Image her boyfriend, who is also a cop, is so over-protective she worries about what would happen if they were in a dangerous situation together. Also because I want to have lots of opportunity to have her grow as a woman and as a police officer. Winters is just a nice guy. He has a hard job and he fears that it will turn him hard.  But it doesn’t, because he is at heart a good man.

Q. Why did you choose to set a series in a small community? Now that you’ve written several books set there, do you see disadvantages and advantages to the setting that you didn’t see at first? Do you think it limits the type of story you can tell?

A. These books could only be set in a small town. Because, as I said, Molly Smith is so junior that in a city she would spend her day writing traffic tickets. But because she knows this town and its inhabitants, Winters (who is a newcomer) relies on her local knowledge thus she has reason to be involved in major crimes. The books are intended to have a strong focus on the protagonists’ families, Molly Smith’s mother, Lucky, and Winters’ wife, Eliza, and it is the small town, the close-knit community that allows them to be involved, without stretching the bounds of coincidence too much. I really can’t think of any limitations to having the books in a small town. Because Trafalgar is a tourist town (as is its real life inspiration) and home to a lot of transients, plenty of people are coming all the time, and bringing their problems with them.

Q. How do you personally like living in a rural area after leaving your career in the financial industry? Has it been a big adjustment?

A. Love love love it. I seem to have simply settled in here and needed no adjustment at all. I hate it now when I have to go into the city and drive through all that traffic.

Q. You’ve also written suspense. Why did you decide to write a traditional mystery series?

A. My novels Scare the Light Away and Burden of Memory were standalone suspense books. But when I decided to start a series I wanted to write the sort of books I love to read. And that is mostly the traditional British-type police procedural.

Q. Do you think you’ll ever write about the world of finance you left behind?

A. Never. Not interested going back there at all.

Q. Do you take ideas from real life and shape them to create stories? Are any of your characters inspired by real people? Rudolph Steiner, for example – where did that (despicable!) character come from?

A. Very few of my characters or incidents have any basis in reality. The best example, however, is the bike on the cover of In the Shadow of the Glacier, the first book in the series. I had begun the first book when my new bike was stolen. I’d only had it two weeks. I was so mad I wrote a sub-plot into the book about a bike theft ring. And I can assure you, in the book the bike thief comes to a very nasty end. I have spent some time in the last couple of years with police officers trying to get my policing right and some of the funny little things that happen or the stories they tell me are put into the books, but I’ve never used anything as a plot device.
 
Rudolph Steiner, that charming fellow — just a product of my imagination.

Q. Turning the focus to the publishing business, how do you feel about the current wildfire growth of e-publishing? Do you think e-publishing will help small press authors in the long run by taking the expense of bookstore-based marketing out of the equation?

A. I think that e-publishing is going to be a boon for small and mid-sized presses and authors. Not because it will replace books –as long as there are libraries and people who don’t want to change to e-books, there is a market for paper books – but because it will supplement them. More choice, for sure, but I also think that people are going to buy more books for their e-reading devices. They can be spontaneous and just click away and buy a stack of books before they realize what they are doing.

Q. Are you still writing your other series, the Klondike Mysteries?

A. I am still writing the Klondike books. There are two out now, Gold Digger and Gold Fever, and Gold Mountain will be out next fall.

Q. What are you working on now?

A. I have finished the fifth Molly Smith book. It’s titled Among the Departed and will be released by Poisoned Pen Press in May 2011. I’m now going to take a break from Molly and write a standalone. It will be set in my new home of Prince Edward County and will have flashbacks to the United Empire Loyalists who settled this area. Those were the refugees who fled the U.S. after the revolution and settled in Canada. 

Writing Without a Net

By Vicki Delany, guest blogger

Every writer has a different approach to how to structure their novel. Some outline extensively; some do almost nothing in terms of planning. Some concentrate on plot, and the characters follow along; for some character is almost all they have.

Me, I build a story this way: setting-characters-plot. That is, I decide where to set the book, who’s going to be the main character or characters and then come up with a plot. Now that I’m working on a series, steps one and two are pretty much defined before I even begin.

My newest novel is titled Winter of Secrets, and is the third in the Constable Molly Smith series, from by Poisoned Pen Press. This book was a total departure from my usual style of writing, and I’d like to tell you about it.

For most of my adult life I was a computer programmer and then a systems analyst. I write books like I designed computer systems. I start at the end – I know who did it and why – and then I go to the beginning and create an outline that will, hopefully, chart a course to get me to that end. Like designing computer systems: you really should know what you want to achieve (i.e. is this programme going to credit the client’s account or debit it?) before you begin. I have met some computer programmes that I don’t think were ever intended to achieve anything, but that’s another matter.

I was spending Christmas 2007 in my favourite place in the world, Nelson, B.C., the inspiration for the fictional town of Trafalgar. It was snowing, quite heavily, but as is the norm in those mountains, there wasn’t any wind and the snow was falling straight down and not drifting. This, I thought, would be a mess if they had winds like we get in Ontario. And then the opening scene popped into my head.

What a great idea, thinks I. I started writing the first chapter and carried on typing frantically away from there. I knew who died, but I didn’t know who killed him, or why, or even if anyone did! It was quite a strange feeling; a pure leap of hope, that I would find some inspiration down the line.

I was nearing the climax – I knew what I wanted to happen there – but I was still unsure between two possible candidates for the role of villain. Over the course of the writing, I had several people in mind, but as it evolved only two were good prospects. I felt sort of like a real Constable Molly Smith, judging the suspects and juggling clues until, with a burst of inspiration, I solved the crime!

My second drafts are usually a lot of work, but with this book, it was even more so. Because I didn’t know that X was the guilty party, I had to go back and make X know more than they seemed to and Y know less. The personality of X didn’t change much throughout the book, but it had to be tweaked a bit to make the crime more plausible, and to drop a few clues here and there. And all the clues that pointed to Y had to be toned down.

It was a fun way to go about it. Will I do that again? No. It worked because I had a very definite idea for the opening of the book and I was prepared to work my way forward from there. But all in all, I prefer to have a good outline before beginning. When I started working on the next book in the series, Negative Image, I put that net up first.

Visit the author's web site at www.vickidelany.com.

The Dreaded Book Tour

By Vicki Delany, guest blogger


Before I became a writer I imagined the book tour as follows:

· T day minus one month – Receive schedule of appearances from publisher.
· T Day minus three weeks – Receive airline tickets and hotel reservations from publisher.
· T Day minus two weeks – Shop for suitable clothes for appearances.
· T Day minus two weeks – Send receipts for new clothes to publisher.
· T Day minus one week – Receive list of newspaper and radio interviews from publisher.
· T Day minus two days – Check ink levels in good pen.
· T Day minus one day – Pack suitcase and go to bed early.
· T Day – Be ready on time for limo pickup for drive to airport.
· Duration of Book Tour: Have fun, meet people and talk about books and writing.

Now that I am a writer, I know that the book tour goes as follows:

· T Day minus 6 months - Send introductory e-mail to every bookstore and library in target area.
· T Day minus 5.5 months – Follow up every e-mail with telephone call.
· T Day minus 5.5 months to T-Day minus 1 month -- Follow up phone call with another phone call. Repeat.
· T Day minus 3 months – Notice that book store A is 8 hours drive from book store B, and the signing at bookstore A finishes one half hour before the signing at book store B begins.
· T Day minus 3 months – Juggle appearances on three days surrounding screw-up mentioned above.
· T Day minus 1 month – Write date and time on postcards for bookstores to hand out.
· T Day minus 2 weeks – Go on Internet to arrange car rental. Be shocked at the cost.
· T Day minus 1 week – See doctor for hand cramp caused by all that writing on postcards.
· T Day minus 6 days – Go to bank to withdraw cash for trip.
· T Day minus 6 days – PANIC.
· T Day minus 5 days – Receive notice from airline that flight has been rescheduled. It now leaves at 3:45 AM.
· T Day minus 2 days – Try on suitable clothes for being centre of attention. Suck in belly. Sigh heavily.
· T Day – Get up early; drive to airport; pay enormous amount for long-term parking; wait hours to board plane; wait more hours for plane to depart.
· Duration of Book Tour: Have fun, meet people and talk about books and writing.

Vicki and Deborah Turrell Atkinson are visiting Hawaii and the western U.S. to promote their new mysteries, Valley of the Lost and Pleasing the Dead. Details can be found at Booktour (www.booktour.com/author/vicki_delany) Vicki’s trailer for Valley of the Lost is on Youtube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOJ4m391LZQ

A Chat with Vicki Delany

Sandra Parshall

Vicki Delany is the author of two psychological suspense novels and the upcoming first book in a police procedural series. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and raised mostly in Ontario, she traveled to South Africa in her twenties, married a man she met there and had three daughters. After eleven years, Vicki returned to Canada, where she still lives. Her stay in Africa, she says, gave her “an insight into to the politics of power and oppression that few Canadians get to experience.”

Would you tell us about your path to publication? How long were writing before you published your first book?

Several years at least. When I look back now, I can see that my first efforts weren't really good enough, so I'm not surprised that they were rejected. But then I began taking advice, and criticism, and got Scare the Light Away to the point where Poisoned Pen Press were kind enough to accept it.

Have you found readers in the U.S. receptive to your Canadian settings and characters?

Generally when I meet American readers they seem to enjoy the Canadian elements. Either because they like reading about people in different countries, or because they have some sort of link with Canada and love to read books that reinforce that link.

What attracted you to the World War II era as a background and setting for fiction?

My books Scare the Light Away and Burden of Memory are both contemporary stories with flashbacks to World War II. I think that the war years were so tramautic for almost everyone who lived through them, particularly, of course, in places where the bombs were actually falling and shots being fired, that it is easy to imagine that some of the drama, the consequences, of that time can effect families and individuals all these years later. And old secrets are the life-blood of suspense novels. My new novel, In the Shadow of the Glacier, due out in September, is strictly a contemporary setting - some of the drama in that book is influenced by things that happened during the Vietnam War, but there are no flashbacks or remembrances. Glacier, incidently, is the first in a series featuring Constable Molly Smith and Seargant John Winters of the (fictional) Trafalgar City Police.

You lived in South Africa for a number of years. Do you plan to use your experiences there in your fiction?

I would like to, very much. For one thing, I haven't been back to South Africa for more than twenty years, and I'd love to. I thought a bit about having a back story during the Boer War (in which Canadians were involved), but that seems to have been abandoned. Perhaps some day I'll resurrect the idea.

What attracts you to psychological suspense, as opposed to straight mystery?

I like family dynamics - families are a gold mine for crime writers! Although I hasten to add that there is nothing in my own family that might cause me to think so! I like books that are character driven as much as, or more than, plot driven. For In the Shadow of the Glacier I wanted to write a traditional police procedural, but it has some elements of psychological suspense as well. The setting is a very small town and the police have to deal with their own families, and their own relationships, which may (or may not) have some involvement with the crime they are investigating.

Do you work full-time? How do you fit writing and promotion into your life?

I was fortunate enough to reitre at the end of March. Up until then I had been working full time as a systems analyst at a major bank. And it was tough finding the time for my writing. What suffered was the promotion end of the business. But this year I'm planning to really get out there any promote the books. I'm going to Murder in the Grove in June, to Bouchercon in September, and plan to take In the Shadow of the Glacier on a book tour down the west coast in October/November. I'm spending the summer in the interior of British Columbia, close to where the Constable Molly Smith books are set, and I'll really enjoy writing the next book when I'm right there. I even have a lunch date coming up with the police detective kind enough to help me with In the Shadow of the Glacer.

What aspects of your writing have you consciously tried to improve?

Plot!
Characters and setting have always been inportant to me, more than plot.
But now that I'm doing a police procedural series, the plot has to be tight and focused. I'm working very hard on that

What writers have influenced you? What qualities attract you in another author's work?

The book about writing that I enjoyed the most was On Writing, by Stephen King. The books I most like to read are the standard British police procedurals -- Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson, the (sadly) late Jill McGown. Books with real depth of character combined with an intricate plot.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

In On Writing, Stephen King says that if you want to be a writer you have to do two things - you have to write and you have to read. Sounds simple but that's about it. There's no point in thinking about how one day you'll start that book. You have to sit down and write it. And if you want to know what people want to read, then you have to read as well.

Learn more about the author and her work at www.vickidelany.com.