How much reality do you need?

by Sandra Parshall

A hot discussion on DorothyL has taught me – or maybe I should say re-taught me – a couple of things.

One: If an author is going to write about religion, he/she should get the details exactly right. Even lapsed practitioners of a faith are ultra-sensitive to the smallest errors in the portrayal of their religion.

Two: Devout fans of an author do not want to hear that the writer has made a mistake in his or her presentation of any aspect of a religion. The fans may  accept the author’s version, a product of research, over that of someone who lives the faith.

This type of argument quickly bores me, and I’m not interested in reviving the DL kerfuffle here. But it brought to mind several questions that I think are worth the attention of writers and readers.

Why is religion different from other subjects? Why is the need for accuracy greater when an author ventures into the territory of any faith?

After all, readers routinely shrug off fictionalized, inaccurate details of criminal behavior and crime investigation. We all know that in the real world autopsies aren’t normally performed within 24 hours of a murder, but we accept that kind of speed because it’s necessary to maintain the pacing of a crime novel. We all know that in the real world most serial killers are sad and weird and revolting, and they don’t play clever games with the police, but we allow writers to glamorize these sick people for the sake of their stories. We all know that most thieves aren’t terribly bright, don’t look like George Clooney or Brad Pitt, and don’t pull off brilliantly planned and executed heists involving a gazillion dollars, but we prefer the Hollywood version. And we all know that in real life private investigators don’t go around solving all the murders that baffle the police, yet we love reading about fictional private eyes who do exactly that.

Sure, writers try to get the tiny details of police work right. We know that the same readers who will accept a 24-hour turnaround on autopsies will complain loudly if we get a minuscule forensic detail wrong. Someone on DorothyL quoted the old adage of writing teachers: “Readers will swallow a camel and choke on a gnat.” So true. If we get the gnats right, maybe we can slip in a whopping camel or two and get away with it.

A disclaimer from the author can go a long way toward buying reader acceptance: “This is a work of fiction. I have taken liberties with geography, police procedure, the drying time of plaster, whatever, for dramatic purposes.” If such a disclaimer appears in the book, up front, I’m not sure purists who go ahead and read the book anyway have a right to complain about inaccuracies afterward. They’ve been warned: this is not a true story.

But would that work with books featuring religious life as a major element? Must the author have the credentials of a follower of the faith in order to avoid criticism? Faye Kellerman has written a long string of popular mysteries that have Orthodox Judaism as a strong theme, and as far as I know she has never been criticized for the way she portrays the religion and its people. On the contrary, because she is a devout Orthodox Jew herself, she is credited with offering a window into that world. We can’t always be what we write about, though, and we won’t necessarily learn enough through research to present the situation realistically.

How do you feel about it? How much realism do you demand in crime fiction? Do factual errors ruin a book for you, or can you overlook them?

Is religion a hot button for you? What else is, if anything? What kind of mistake would make you stop reading?

Do disclaimers work for you? Can you forgive mistakes if the writer states up front that he/she has taken liberties with reality?

How a 7/9 Split Improved My Business

Sharon Wildwind

I’ve mentioned before that my favorite math was geometry. Last weekend when I came upon Seth Godin’s Acute Heptagram of Impact, I loved it. Even the name. The Acute Heptagram of Impact could be steam punk, could be Dr. Who and I’m into both right now. Cool title aside, I like Godin’s blogs because they are gems of business information that make me think.

The Heptagram of Impact contains seven area, which Godin suggests successful businesses have to address simultaneously as they work to improve themselves. The problem is too many businesses try to address one areas at a time, instead of looking at the whole picture.

The problem was, I saw the heptagram as an optical illusion. If I counted the individual points, there were seven, just like they should be for a heptagram. If I looked at the drawing as a whole, my brain registered 3 sets of 3 points each. That makes nine. Seven—nine—seven—nine. My eyes and brain totally distracted me from thinking about my writing business, which wasn't what Godin had in mind. First, I had to sort out how seven points could become nine.

Godin’s drawing was in black-and-white, and since I love colors and fancy letters, I redrew the diagram. All that did was make the 3 sets of 3 stand out better.

What I finally had to do was make seven copies and, on each one, eliminate all but three points. What I ended up with was seven sort of Star-Trekie badge designs of three points each. What I’d missed before was that each of the seven elements shared a point with the one next to it. That’s why my eyes sometimes saw seven points and sometimes nine.

This is the triad that popped out at me. Oh, fiddle, that encapsulated a business problem I’ve wrestled with for months. I’ve made some promises to people that I haven’t kept, so I’m pretty sure that my reputation is certain quarters in the pits. I thought I was putting off rectifying those situations for lots of reasons, but it boiled down to fear. Fortunately, I think I have the persistence to make them right, and everything will probably be okay. That gave me a tremendous sense of relief.

I went into this writing business knowing there was a huge business component. My total qualifications to run my own business were

1. I’d sold Girl Scout cookies as a child.
2. I knew how to make a personal budget and had navigated filing my taxes every year, so how difficult could it be to do a business budget and file business taxes every year?
3. I knew how to write education objectives, so how difficult could it be to write business objectives?

Building business acumen has been a bootstrap operation, literally pulling myself up one bit of information at a time. That’s why I’m so delighted when I find something that explains business simply, something I can get.

The seven triads, in case you want to look for connections related to your own writing business, are

• Desire—Strategy—Tactics
• Strategy—Persistence—Execution
• Persistence—Fear—Reputation
• Fear—Tactics—Desire
• Tactics—Execution—Strategy
• Execution—Reputation—Persistence
• Reputation—Desire—Fear

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Quote for the week

You have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself.

~Seth Godin, entrepreneur, author and public speaker.

Autumns Past, Autumn Present

by Julia Buckley

There's something about fall that makes me nostalgic, and when I see photographs of autumns past, I feel even more so.  In this particular shot, my two-year-old son Graham (in a Batman cape made out of an old skirt of his grandmother's) wields a rake too big for him so that he can do adult-type things.  Graham is famous for a moment of fierce independence, when a parent said "Graham, let me help you," and he said, "Ah hep mah self." 

His brother Ian, almost five, has a tell-tale leaf stuck to his back which reveals that this raking is not about having a neat yard, but about having a huge leaf pile.  He is wielding another tool that I don't recognize, but it looks like some sort of plastic toy.  I'm fairly certain that they leaped into the leaves not long after this picture was taken.

Ironically, if I asked these same boys (now fourteen and seventeen) to rake leaves today, there would be a great deal of push-back.  They no longer jump in the leaves, although they do occasionally wrestle on the ground, sometimes good-naturedly pretending to kill each other, other times actually trying to kill each other. Most of my autumn is spent carting them around--to school, to a job, to movies. If I call them from one of my own jobs, they are almost certain to be on a video game or the computer.  Autumn today is filled with you-tube, Facebook, and simulated war games, none of which really bring them up close to the lovely scent of the moist earth and the fragrant leaves.

I'd be a hypocrite, especially since I'm sitting here writing for a blog, if I didn't admit that I, too, am spending far less time outside thanks to my laptop.  Facebook, Twitter, You-Tube, blogging and writing all take up time that I used to have ten years ago.  I'm actually reading less and walking less, but spending a great deal of time chained to my computer, not only for my two jobs, but for my "freelance" career of writing.

The only outside time I spent today was to drive to the grocery store and back--pretty sad--and yet I didn't get half of the things on my indoor checklist finished.

Autumns of the past seemed more full of time, full of weekend fun like zoo visits, backyard fire pit marshmallow roasts, impromptu fall trips, and family walks.  Autumn now seems more about obligations of all sorts--but not necessarily the fun kind.  :)

I suppose this says something about the seasons of life.  Ian is looking at colleges--he graduates this year.  Graham graduates, too, from eighth grade, and then my little boys will officially be a thing of the past.  Time is moving them onward and making me feel more urgent. The "so much to do, so little time" mentality applies to life now as I try to scrounge up college payments and try to prepare for a lot of unknowns.

Wise Buddha advised, "Do not dwell on the past; do not dream of the future; concentrate the mind on the present moment."

So, despite the fact that autumn is different now, I'm determined to appreciate it for what it is.  And darn it, I pledge to walk on those leaf-strewn sidewalks.  To prove it, I'll post pictures of my fall odyssey next Monday.  

On the Trail of a Story

By Sheila Webster Boneham

Tracking down a story can be challenging for a writer, just as tracking down quarry can be challenging for a dog. When I started my first mystery, Drop Dead on Recall, I wasn’t sure I could write fiction. And although I can’t ask her to verify, I’m pretty sure that when my Lily started training for her tracking title, she wasn’t sure she could track a stranger, either, at least not in the precise fashion required by the rules.

The analogy may seem a little far-fetched, but I hope you’ll bear with me. I often see parallels between writing and canine sports, and my new Animals in Focus series is full of dogs, cats, and other critters, so the notion of writing as a kind of tracking makes sense to me.

Writers begin with some basic tools. We have fabulous words and we have grammar to help us arrange them into meaningful order. Above all, we have a natural human tendency to frame experience as “story.” We explain, excuse, argue, teach, and entertain through narratives that we structure with beginnings and endings, suspense and surprise. Beyond that, a story always finds an audience, because we human beings love to have plots and characters and wordplay presented to us. Whether we listen to or read them, we love stories.

Dogs also begin with some basic tools. They have fabulous noses with some 125 to perhaps 300 million scent receptors, depending on the breed (compared to our measly 50 million). Unlike a newborn puppy’s eyes and ears, which are not fully formed and which remain sealed for the first ten days to two weeks, the nose works delightfully well at birth. I used to breed Australian Shepherds, and I’ve seen puppies follow their twitchy little noses to the milk bar before they’re fully out of the birth canal. “Smells good, Mom. Yip!” Our puppies learned within the first few minutes to identify their mothers and their pack – including my husband and me – purely by scent, and a stranger’s scent, even within a few hours of birth, would elicit a startle response. In fact, a puppy’s olfactory abilities are way ahead of a child’s story-telling skills for a good few years! 

Even very young puppies can begin tracking training. I started training my Labrador Retriever, Lily, when she was seven weeks old. Here’s Lily tracking a strange person’s scent at twelve weeks of age.

Back to the original story.... I had been writing nonfiction more than two decades by the time I tried fiction, and I wasn’t at all sure I could make up a story, especially a big enough story to make a novel. And then one day I was driving home from an obedience trial, and an opening line popped into my head. It was brilliant! And not only did I have a brilliant opening line, but I could see the whole brilliant book – not the cover or spine, but the guts! I had a story. All I had to do was write it....

Like most writers, I do a lot of other things besides write. I paint, I hike, and for many years I’ve trained and competed with my dogs. While I was working on my novel (in between nonfiction books), I was also competing in obedience with my Aussie, Jay, and starting my Labrador puppy, Lily, in obedience and tracking. Lily took to tracking like, well, a Lab to water. But just as I had to learn new writing skills in order to craft a story that people might want to read, Lily had to learn to follow the scent trail that I wanted her to follow so that she could find something I wanted her to bring me. (And I had to learn to trust that we were both on the right tracks!)

Lily and Sheila tracking Jim Huang’s “missing” daughter Miranda at a meeting of the Speed City Sisters in Crime in 2009. Photo courtesy of Brenda Robertson Stewart.

Lily earned her American Kennel Club Tracking Dog (TD) title before she was two years old. I finished my first mystery when I was...well, never mind! That brilliant first line is long gone, but the basic premise that followed me home from the obedience trial remains.  Drop Dead on Recall was released in September. I’m pretty excited about that, but Lily still thinks lost gloves are more interesting than piles of paper, although she’s tolerant of human foibles.

Our work isn’t finished, though. Lily is gearing up to demonstrate how tracking dogs work to the Triangle Sisters in Crime (NC) in December. It’s not her first presentation to crime writers – she tracked down a “missing” person for the Speed City SinC members when she was only five months old. For my part, I’m wrapping up the sequel to Drop Dead on Recall this week, and am thinking ahead to book three in the series. Before I begin, though, I think Lily and I will go out and see if we can track down a little fall fun.
************************************

Drop Dead on Recall (Midnight Ink)

When a top-ranked competitor keels over at a dog obedience trial, photographer Janet MacPhail is swept up in a maelstrom of suspicion, jealousy, cut-throat competition, death threats, pet-napping, and murder. She becomes a “person of interest” to the police, and apparently to major hunk Tom Saunders as well. As if murder and the threat of impending romance aren’t enough to drive her bonkers, Janet has to move her mother into a nursing home, and the old lady isn’t going quietly. Janet finds solace in her Australian Shepherd, Jay, her tabby cat, Leo, and her eccentric neighbor, Goldie Sunshine. Then two other “persons of interest” die, Jay’s life is threatened, Leo disappears, and Janet’s search for the truth threatens to leave her own life underdeveloped – for good.

Sheila Webster Boneham is also the author of seventeen nonfiction books about animals, including the highly regarded Rescue Matters! How to Find, Foster, and Rehome Companion Animals. Six of Sheila’s books have been named best in their categories by the Dog Writers Association of America and the Cat Writers Association, and several others have been finalists in the groups’ annual competitions. Sheila also writes narrative nonfiction and poetry, teaches writing workshops, and, yes, competes with her dogs. Learn more at http://www/sheilaboneham.com, or keep up with Sheila’s latest news on Facebook and Twitter.   

The Measure of a Man (or Woman)

by Sheila Connolly

This past week I was at Bouchercon (along with Sandy and Jeri), where as a treat for all of us not from Cleveland the opening ceremonies were held at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  The organizers were kind enough to allow us time to wander around and explore the exhibits (there might have been a riot if they hadn't).  One person later commented that people from our group tended to go around alone, as if to revisit their own musical memories in private.

 

Why is it that we are fascinated by the clothes of public figures?  I realized as I walked through the exhibits that quite often we tend to make iconic people larger than they really are, and since we are unlikely ever to encounter them in person, it's easy to do.  That's why it can be a shock when you're confronted by evidence of the real thing, er, person.  Here are some things I learned, based on clothing alone:

--Elvis was much smaller than I thought

--John Lennon was larger than I thought

--Johnny Cash had really big feet

--Somebody there loves Stevie Nicks, because they had no fewer than five of her outfits on display (I already knew she was small—and she's been wearing platform boots forever)

But then I recalled that this is not the first time I came face to face with the clothing of the greats.  More than a decade ago, to lift my mother out of a funk after her mother's death, I took her and my young daughter to France.  My mother was a lifelong reader of historical fiction, usually involving royalty, so of course we visited as many chateaux as we could fit in, with a few medieval sites for me.

 

One of our stops was at Malmaison, a small chateau that once belonged to Joséphine de Beauharnais, wife of Napoléon Bonaparte (she apparently bought it without consulting him while he was off fighting somewhere), west of Paris.  It's a somewhat obscure museum—most of the local people we asked had no idea where to find it.  In any case, we succeeded.

 

In the museum they have a uniform worn by Napoléon—and it's tiny.  He was both short and slender, and it's hard to imagine such a diminutive person leading armies and building an empire.  It says much for his strength of will and personal magnetism.

 

On the same trip, we happened to wander into the cathedral of Sens, where Thomas Becket spent much of his time in exile, starting in 1164—and there on display are some of his very ordinary clothes.  (Can you imagine keeping clothing intact for nine hundred years? BTW--I made a small contribution toward the upkeep of the cathedral's collections!)  And he was not tiny, although not large (except perhaps by the standards of his day). They even had a pair of his shoes.

When you grow up steeped in the mythologies of history-altering public figures like Napoléon or Becket, you don't always realize that they were ordinary physical people.  It is intensely moving the be able to hold up your own hand next to such displays and to find a sense of human scale across the centuries.

 

Rock stars are our current royalty, and yet, the exhibits at the Hall of Fame prove that they aren't larger than life. I'm still not sure whether I'm happy or sad to know that, but I'll admit I feel just a little closer to them. Thank you, Bouchercon committee!

 

Small Towns, Big Mystery

Shelley Freydont (Guest Blogger)

What is it about small towns that attract so many murderous thoughts? There are shelves and shelves of mysteries set in small town USA. And readers never seem to tire of small town settings.

I’ve always been infatuated with small towns. I’ve never lived in a really tiny one. And I’m sure they may not always be the Norman Rockwell wholesome places we imagine. If they were, what would happen to all those fabulous mysteries? Miss Marple would be up to her neck in knitting but no sleuthing. Jessica Fletcher would probably have written three hundred books but never caught a bad guy.

And what would happen to all the wonderful characters of my fellow mystery authors? They would quietly spend their time quilting, cooking, embroidering, hair styling, dog grooming, book selling, spatting with their mother-in-laws, dating hunky policemen, and all sorts of wonderful things, but without a murder. I mean where’s the fun?

That’s why readers love a cozy. They appeal to people who love to learn about something new and enjoy reading about people they can relate to, but who are thrown into unusual and sometimes dire circumstances. How will they react? How would we?

I firmly believe that it takes a village, whether it’s living a good life or getting a daunting job done. When I first thought about writing my new mystery series, I knew I wanted a small country town filled with loyal, optimistic, hard-working folk.

And I wanted a sleuth that had to learn about that kind of loyalty, the kind of perseverance that keeps a town going through the bad times as well as the good. So I invented a town, Celebration Bay, whose economy had once depended on the local cannery. When it closed, they didn’t give up and bemoan their fate (well, maybe just a little), they threw a party, and then another and a new industry was born, tourism. Now every day’s a holiday in Celebration Bay.

In fact their festivals have grown so large, they need to hire a professional event organizer. My sleuth Liv Montgomery is a successful Manhattan event planner who’s had enough of big city stress. She longs for a simpler life where people appreciate her and her work, where she can enrich people’s life, not just arrange events to wow the corporate competition or surpass the last year’s society wedding, and where her Westie terrier, Whiskey, can roam the great out of doors.

So I had my fish out of water and my good folks of Celebration Bay. Both with a giant learning curve ahead of them. As Liv gets to know her neighbors, we do, too. And with so many festivals, I get to play with different seasonal props and settings. Food, quilts, crafts, choirs, hayrides, mystery mazes, Revolutionary war reenactments. Quaint stores, barns, Lake Champlain, haunted houses.

For such a small town, the possibilities for murder are endless.

And since Celebration Bay is a popular destination town with festivals for every holiday or season, there will be plenty of outsiders to provide victims and murderers, thereby avoiding the Saint Mary Mead and Cabot Cove syndromes. I don’t really want any of my favorite characters to die or go to jail.

But you never know what will happen when you start getting to know your characters. Some take life in stride, some go over the edge. Some are just oblivious. And some become good friends (So maybe they’re imaginary, they’re still friends.) And suspicion can bring out the very worst in people you thought you knew. It can also bring out the best.

And like in so many small towns, once Liv has solved a murder, everyone expects her to solve the others, and of course, being locals, they all are curious, have their own theories of whodunit, and want to help her find the killer, even if they just make things crazier.

That’s another good thing about a cozy set in a small town. With each book the characters become more familiar. And if we, the authors, are successful, the reader will begin to love them as much as we do. Become invested in how their lives turn out and can’t wait to meet them again over the next body.

Shelley Freydont is the author of eight mysteries that have been translated into seven languages. She loves puzzles of all kinds and when not writing or reading mysteries, she’s most likely working on a jigsaw, Sudoku, or crossword. As Shelley Noble, her first women’s fiction novel, Beach Colors, will be published by William Morrow in 2012. More about Shelley at www.shelleyfreydont.com and www.facebook.com/ShelleyFreydont.

Bouchercon Gleanings

By Sandra Parshall

Outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

I can envision a time when Bouchercon expands to a full week, from 8 a.m. the first day to 6 p.m. the last. And the panels and other events will spread into a second hotel (next door if attendees are lucky).

If you’ve never been to Bouchercon, the World Mystery Conference, you can’t imagine how big it is, how noisy it is, how thoroughly, down-to-the-bone exhausting it is.

So many writers now attend, all of them expecting a spot in the limelight, that a full day of panels now takes place on the first day, Thursday, before the opening ceremonies in the evening. Attendees who used to arrive Thursday afternoon now have to get there twenty-four hours earlier (and pay for another night in a hotel) if they don’t want to miss anything. If they stay for the whole thing, they won’t see home again until late Sunday. A lot of people have to select just a couple of days to attend, and suitcases roll in and out the hotel doors throughout the event.

I flew to Cleveland, the site of Bouchercon 2012, on Thursday and came home Saturday afternoon, but I still felt as if I’d been there a week, and I packed an amazing amount into my short time. I didn’t take a lot of notes, but I have a headful of recollections that I hope are halfway accurate.

The opening ceremonies were almost overshadowed by the venue, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but toastmaster John Connolly could capture anybody’s attention. Along with the usual intros of honorees and a jokey skit with a short guy named Tom Cruz (don’t ask) about the Jack Reacher film (“Was the role a stretch for you?”), Connolly offered brief but passionate words about the enduring appeal of printed books. He returned to the topic on a panel Saturday morning that was ostensibly about heroes and villains. Both Connolly and fellow panelist Karin Slaughter strayed from fictional characters to the real-life villains they believe are bent on eradicating traditional publishing and its authors.

Connolly said it’s “appalling” to hear writers express so much hatred toward the publishing business and the printed book (“They live on anger”). Because traditional publishing hasn’t met their expectations, he said, some writers want it to fail and disappear, leaving readers with no choice beyond e-books. That kind of world, without brick-and-mortar bookstores, libraries, or physical books, would be a much poorer place.

Karin Slaughter agreed and added another set of true-life villains: people who use online reader reviews to try to destroy the careers of authors they’ve never met. Why get so angry about a book you didn’t enjoy? Write negative comments about a book if you must, she said, but does your review have to be filled with vitriol? And why give a book you haven’t even read a one-star rating when your only complaint is that the e-book version costs too much? The author doesn’t set the price, so why try to hurt his or her career? Keep in mind, Slaughter said, that the author you’re ranting about is a real human being, with a family to support and bills to pay.

The current hero in Slaughter’s life is John Connolly, because he asked that she conduct the toastmaster interview with him. Women writers aren’t often invited to interview male honorees at conferences, she said. Often when a male writer interviews a male honoree, the result is guy talk and/or a joke fest. I’ve attended some of those, and found them lamentable, usually to the point that I walked out before the end. By contrast, the Connolly-Slaughter event was a genuine conversation between two fabulous writers, and I enjoyed every minute. (The Georgia and Irish accents were a bonus.)

Another favorite panel was Mysteries & the Movies, with Robin Cook, Charlaine Harris, Jeremy Lynch (moderator), Joseph Finder, and Chelsea Cain. Sitting there listening to those stars talk about the joys and sorrows of seeing their work adapted for the screen was a lot like touring a palace: I’ll never live there, but it’s fascinating to get a peek into that world. Cook and Finder are veterans, but Cain and Harris are still learning how to cope with those odd people who make movies and TV series. When Harris was asked to a meeting about adapting her Harper Connelly mysteries for TV, she was informed that her assistant couldn’t attend. When Harris protested that she needed her assistant there to take notes and remember things that Harris might forget, she was told the assistant couldn’t even be in the building during the meeting. After some negotiation, the assistant was allowed into the building, but not the meeting.

Although Cain is enthusiastic about the adaptation of her series for broadcast on FX, she’s having a little trouble with the thought of her characters being played by actors who may seem totally unsuited to the parts. Clearly she needs a pep talk from Lee Child.  
The panel I most enjoyed – and I don’t know why the room wasn’t packed wall to wall – was Judging a Book by Its Cover. Robin Agnew moderated as Marcia Talley, Heather Blake, Denise Swanson and Avery Aames talked about the selling power of a good cover, the disastrous consequences of a bad one, and the author’s influence, or lack of it, in determining the way a novel will look. Marcia put together a slide show to illustrate how covers of the panelists’ and other authors’ books – including mine – have evolved over the years. She also spotlighted the current fad for covers featuring women in red, a trend I wrote about here recently. Covers are changing as the book industry becomes more mindful of how cover art will look at thumbnail size online. The internet may be pushing publishing toward simple, uncluttered covers with a single strong image on each.

And the best part of Bouchercon? Leaving. I’ll admit it. I’m an unapologetic homebody. As much as I enjoy seeing a swarm of mystery and thriller writers gathered in one place, I live for the moment when the airplane’s tires hit the runway at a DC airport.

Just enough

Sharon Wildwind

I’m lolling in a post-Thanksgiving-supper stupor. Here in Canada we celebrate Thanksgiving the second Monday in October, so today is the absolute earliest that a second Monday would happen. Frankly, Thanksgiving got here before I was ready.

This year it was my turn to cook. Supper was scheduled for five-thirty. About two o’clock the inevitable question arose.

Do we have enough food?

Enough food for what? Feeding the Army of Northern Virginia? Withstanding a siege in the Thirty Years War? Having so many leftovers that the refrigerator seems fuller after the meal than it did before?

As it turned out we had just enough for a tableful of companionable people who were more interested in each other and in good conversation than in massive servings on huge plates. Everyone ate their fill. Leftovers totaled enough food to make a satisfying lunch for one person—we sent that home with one of the guests—half a jar of homemade cranberry jelly, and 2/3rds of a bottle of green olives.

That’s my kind of Thanksgiving.

Which got me thinking about “just enough.”

Ever see those joke snakes in a can? Pull the top off and a spring-wound tube explodes out. That’s what life has felt like since I retired earlier this year. For over a decade I worked a job that involved evening shifts and working every other weekend, which was a bummer as far as my social life was concerned. There was this really high conflict between times I wanted to play and times I had to go to work. I felt lucky if I managed one fun thing a month.

Freed of schedule constraints, I exploded out of the can like that snake. I’ve averaged between 12 and 15 fun things every month, ranging from coffee with a friend to a full-blown three-day convention. The last week in September everything imploded. I raced from commitment to commitment and fell into bed each night wondering who that stranger was sleeping next to me. “Just enough” disappeared from my life.

I’d had a notion this might happen. I have a long history of over-committing. My sig other calls it “quart in a pint pot.” I’d been careful not to make long-term promises like running for office or applying to teach a year-long class—that was a close one. On the day my application was due a voice in my head said, “Wait.” I listened to that voice.

A small part of me is sad that I can’t continue accepting every invitation with unbridled enthusiasm. A larger part of me knows I have to slow down, trim my wings, and get back to putting the writing first. Fortunately, the weather is likely to co-operate. Pretty soon it’s going to get dark and cold here. The idea of popping out for coffee is a lot more appealing when it doesn’t involve multiple clothing layers, ice grips, and shoveling/scrapping snow and ice off the car windshield. I’ve turned around and am heading back toward “just enough,” an idea that gives the stranger sleeping next to me hope that we'll have time for more than sleep. I suspect the journey back will be every bit as much fun as the journey out.

Happy Thanksgiving. I am very grateful for all of you in the writing and reading community.

Quote for the week:

A community is only being created when its members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but simply live each day with new hope, like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets.”

~Jean Vanier, Canadian Catholic philosopher and humanitarian.

Time Travel Online

by Julia Buckley

My current project is set in 1986.  Because of this, I'm finding as I write that I have all sorts of questions about what existed in this year and what did not, what songs were popular, which words and phrases were used and which came later, which shows were on television, et cetera.  You would think, since I can remember many things about my own life in this year, that I would remember everything else.  Not true.  It shocks me to think that 1986 was 26 years ago--it sounds like such a long time.

In any case, the Internet is an amazing research tool in this respect.  Here are some fun websites that I found helpful:

The Eighties Club has all sorts of archived information about this great decade.

Word Origins can be investigated at this interesting blog.

You can find all sort of records of television in past decades, and here is one that I consulted.

Gas prices in 1986 can be easily found online.

I needed to translate some of my dialogue into other languages.  Short of consulting a linguist, one can first try a great site like this.

Car and  Driver provides the top cars of the decade in question.

Police officer information is archived on this Chicago website.

The great thing about research, online or otherwise, is that it leads you to all sorts of interesting things you weren't even looking for.  Research is an edifying experience.

The great Sidney J. Harris used to have a column called "Things I Learned On My Way to Looking Up Other Things."  It always made fascinating reading.  Now that I've been looking up a lot of things, I know exactly what Harris means.

Maybe you can do some of your own research via these interesting sites!  Do you have a fun site of your own to share?

Guest Blogger Edith Maxwell

Thank you so much for having me over.

 

I had my first-ever solo book launch party last week for Speaking of Murder and it was a big success. I held it at one of the two independent bookstores in Newburyport, in the northeast corner of Massachusetts. I have lived in the area for 23 years and attend Friends meeting in the next town over. Over 50 people showed up. It was standing room only and they ran out of both books and wine!

 

What I thought was so interesting was the range of questions that people asked after I read my prepared remarks and read a very short scene. I’ll share here some of the questions.

 

Why the pen name? My book is published under the pen name Tace Baker. While it was being considered by Barking Rain Press, I secured a three-book contract for a different series with Kensington Publishing. The contract stipulated that I couldn’t publish any other mysteries under my name during the term of the contract. When Barking Rain offered me a contract for Speaking of Murder, I had to come up with a pseudonym. Tace is not only a unique name in terms of Googling and URL, it’s also an old Quaker women’s name. And Baker is easy to spell and pronounce and shares a vowel with Tace, so it sounds nice.

 

What TV shows do you watch? I don’t watch TV! Between the day job and commute, daily exercise, cooking and eating, reading the newspaper (yes, on paper), and catching up on facebook, when would I possibly watch television? Besides, I really rather read a book.

 

Did you take a mystery-writing course? Nope. I learned what I know from two main sources: my in-person writing group, and Sisters in Crime. Reading scenes aloud to four or five other excellent writers and hearing their critiques has taught me so much. Attending nearly every Sisters in Crime – New England event for the last seven years has been a wonderful education, and reading many of the SINC and Guppies digests for the same time period has taught me everything I know about publishing. I’ve also been a faithful New England Crime Bake attendee for some years and take eager notes in the workshops. I have signed up for a couple of the online courses but somehow never quite manage to participate fully.

 

Is it normal for the protagonist to be so close to the victim? Ooh. I don’t know what’s normal. That’s just how the story came out. It certainly increased Lauren’s motivation to find the killer, though.

 

Other questions included explaining what a “cozy” is, when I possibly find time to write (weekends, retreats, plane rides…), do you set up “scaffolding” (that is, an outline – answer is no, I write into the headlights and somehow it always comes out okay), when I started reading mysteries, and more.

 

I was a bit nervous before the event. Had I remembered my favorite pen for signing? Would they set out enough chairs? Which earrings should I wear? But I found myself very relaxed once it started. It helped that I had written out my remarks and had rehearsed the scene I read aloud. But I think I most enjoyed the question-and-answer period, which surprised me a little.

 

Do you have any questions for me? What question do you ask an author at an event, or which question do you find yourself being asked most often?

 

 

Edith Maxwell is the author of SPEAKING OF MURDER (Barking Rain Press, September 2012, under pseudonym Tace Baker), which features Quaker linguistics professor Lauren Rousseau.

Edith also writes the Local Foods Mysteries. A TINE TO LIVE, A TINE TO DIE introduces organic farmer Cam Flaherty and a colorful Locavore Club (Kensington Publishing, June 2013). Edith once owned and operated the smallest certified organic farm in Essex County, Massachusetts.

A technical writer and fourth-generation Californian, Edith also writes short crime fiction and lives north of Boston in an antique house with her beau and three cats.