Fonts

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I read that New York City will be changing the font on its street signs from Highway Gothic (which it has used since the beginning of city highways) to something called Clearview.

Per Wikipedia, "The FHWA Series fonts (often informally referred to as Highway Gothic) are a set of sans-serif typefaces developed by the United States Federal Highway Administration and used for road signage in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia, Spain, Venezuela, the Netherlands, Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and New Zealand. The fonts were created to maximize legibility at a distance and at high speed."

 New York chose to use the font in all-caps mode (sometimes considered "shouting" in Internet parlance).  Now there is a federal mandate that requires that those signs in all capital letters must be replaced with mixed case (upper and lower) signage.

When Highway Gothic was first used, there was no formal testing of the readability of fonts.  At least there was a consistency to the appearance of road signs, not only locally but also nationally.

 But now science has caught up with fonts, and early researchers found that Clearview is 16 per cent easier to read than Highway Gothic. If you're going sixty on a highway, you'd have an extra 1-2 seconds to respond, or a few hundred feet. Clearview may have less personality, but it's more legible, particularly from a distance.

The old (left) and the new (right)

Would that publishers would think the same way.  Certainly publishers have used a variety of fonts over the years. I've always enjoyed the little notes on the front or back pages saying that a book was printed in Boldoni Bold or some such, even while not knowing what the heck they were talking about. At least the publisher was proud of its choice. But by and large, these days mass market paperbacks are published in something that looks pretty much like good old Times New Roman. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it means that to an average reader, it simply looks like "book" font.  They don't have to think about it.

But there's another twist (and please, editors and publishers, tell me if I'm wrong).  Mass market books, at least those from Berkley, are issued in a standard size and page length (check any Amazon listing)—304 pages (it was 288 pages for a long time).  This is because that size fits neatly, 48 to a box, and all boxes are the same size.

Now, the standard word count for my type of paperback—cozies—is anywhere between 65,000 and 80,000 words. This is a pretty wide range.  If you write long, as I sometimes do (topping out at 84,000 words), does the publisher change the page count? 

No. They change the font size and/or the line spacing, making it a bit harder to read. Now consider that most of our readers are women of middle-age or beyond, who may be having problems with aging eyes, and you wonder why the publisher is sacrificing ease of reading for shipping convenience.  Or driving readers to e-readers where the owner can adjust the font size onscreen.

Who wins?

Habits for the 21st Century

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve been thinking about things that everybody used to do that no one does any more. Or do they? How about reading in the bathroom? When I was growing up in the 1950s, most literate households had a bookshelf in the bathroom. Visitors could conduct their own household-to-household sociological survey by perusing their friends’ and neighbors’ shelves. Does your Kindle accompany you to the loo? And with the accelerated pace of postmodern life, who has time to read there?

Then there’s going out to mail a letter. You didn’t have to dress up to take a pleasant little constitutional to the nearest corner, where you could always find a mailbox. Nowadays? For one thing, who writes letters? In English novels, people were always excusing themselves from present company to write letters. In Jane Austen’s time, it was the fastest way to communicate with family and friends in other towns and the conventional way to communicate with neighbors even within a village. Now we can email, text, Skype, post on Facebook, and have a conversation on the phone wherever we are. I wish those cellphonistas on the bus would excuse themselves when they have private business to discuss.

As it happens, I still buy stamps, and I do mail the occasional envelope on my corner. This probably makes me a Luddite, since the USPS is constantly trying to get me to get my postage online and print it out at home, and all my utility companies and other creditors would like me to go to their websites to pay the monthly bills. I use my own bank’s online service for many regular bills, but with others, it’s proven more trouble than it’s worth. Case in point: one month my billionaire landlord refused the rent check on my rent-controlled apartment on the grounds the check came from a “third-party payer”—in other words, my bank. If I hadn’t figured out a workaround, I might have lost my apartment. Since then, I pay my rent by check.

Then there’s the mail that I’m not allowed to put in the mailbox. Anything that weighs more than 13 ounces must not only be carried to the post office, but be handed to a living person. There is an automated machine that will weigh my envelope or package and spit out digital postage. I can then put the piece in a giant drum of a mailbox. If, however, I have made the mistake of weighing the thing at home and putting on actual stamps, I’m not allowed to put it in the drum, but must wait on line—along with customers who actually have business to transact, sometimes at great length—to put the package in a living hand. The other day, I weighed in a three-pound manuscript in a lightweight bubble wrap envelope, answered all the digital questions about whether it contained any hazardous materials and whether I wanted to add any additional services, and then was told (digitally) that the printer wasn’t working so I’d have to stand on line (that’s a line of human beings, who in my branch post office usually outnumber the tellers by 20 to 1) to buy my stamps.

And let’s get back to the cellphonistas for a moment. (I’m always good for a rant on them.) In the 1980s, when I became a mental health professional, there were already plenty of people walking the streets alone while talking with unseen listeners. However, all of them were either schizophrenic (the ones who hear voices) or suffering from Tourette’s (the ones who involuntarily blurt out obscenities in public). Nowadays….

Hiding in Plain Sight

by John Foxjohn
Author of Killer Nurse

I got involved in the Kimberly Clark Saenz (pronounced Signs) case in early 2008 when the Angelina County, Texas, district attorney charged her with capital murder and sought the death penalty. As a former homicide detective, I recognized the magnitude and scope of what would take place. Never in our history had anyone been accused, charged, and convicted of murder with bleach as the weapon.

But that wasn’t the only huge circumstance involved with Saenz. If convicted, she would be a serial killer. This is a rare distinction for a woman, but serial killers don’t happen in East Texas—male or female.

It would take three years for the case to come to trial, and in many ways, my hands were tied beforehand. I was able to talk to a lot of fringe people who knew Saenz. I even interviewed the judge who would oversee the case, but the interview consisted of background information on him—nothing to do with the case. I even interviewed one of the assistant DA’s, but he wasn’t involved in the case. He gave me some really good information on the death penalty and all aspects of it. These were issues that I would need to know for the book but weren’t part of the case.

However, I wasn’t able to speak to anyone directly involved. First, the judge imposed a gag order until the trial was over, and of course the defense attorney was advising everyone not to talk.

During the three weeks of voir dire (jury selection) and the four weeks of trial I spoke to Kimberly Clark Saenz and her family several times—not about the case, just regular talk. The only thing I did was mention that I would like to interview them when the trial was over—either way.

They asked me what I was going to write and I told them I didn’t know—which was the truth—I couldn’t know without a trial and a verdict. I was actually one of the few unbiased people that watched the trial.

Things really heated up after the trial and her conviction. I had a contract with Berkley/Penguin—now Penguin/Random House, and I had to have the completed manuscript in on August 1, 2012. Along with that, I had to send in between 12-20 pictures and all the permission forms to go with them.

The trial ended in May, and of course I had not interviewed a single person who was vital to the case.

Although I had never written a true crime, as a homicide detective I had interviewed thousands of people. Veteran cops learn early on that timing and setup of an interview is important. I began working on this in voir dire. First I knew that they couldn’t talk to me, so when I first met them, I said, “I know you can’t talk to me now and I won’t even try, but I would love to interview you when it is over.”

They respected this—especially as the process continued, and I lived up to my word. They also saw that I went the extra mile to find out the truth—something a lot of the journalists that covered the trial didn’t do.

In the end, I had incredible cooperation from a majority of the people involved. The prosecution was made up of two other attorneys besides the DA. I interviewed the DA four times as well as the others. Everyone in the police department cooperated and one of the defense attorneys sat down and talked to me for hours with the recorder rolling.

Everyone cooperated except the Saenz family. They refused to talk to me because they decided that I would not write the truth—that being that she was innocent and the court and jury had got it wrong. They never asked—just assumed that I wouldn’t do this—but I have to say that this was a correct assumption.

In many ways I respected their decision and even expected it. Their wife, daughter, mother, niece, or cousin was just convicted of five murders and three attempts. What I didn’t expect was them, especially the husband, using Facebook and other venues to discourage people from talking to me.

Obviously, this got the hackles rising on the back of my neck. It was almost as if they were afraid I would find out something. 

One of the most important facts I eventually found out was the husband was an ex-con. He’d been arrested in Houston for two different felonies: one for theft greater than $750.00 but less than $20,000, and the other for felony possession of five pounds of marijuana. If you don’t know how much that is, it is enough to fill a metal office waste can to overflowing.

Now why would they not want this information to get out? Maybe it had to do with the fact that the husband worked for the Angelina County appraisal district as an appraiser.

This is the type of information that is only found if someone is motivated to look. He went from not being a real part of the book to his mug shot being featured in the photo section in the book.

If they’d have just left it alone I would never have delved as deep as I did. Now the entire world knows that Angelina County has an ex-con evaluating their property.

*******************
Best-selling author John Foxjohn epitomizes the phrase "been there—done that." Born and raised in the rural East Texas town of Nacogdoches, he quit high school and joined the Army at seventeen. Viet Nam veteran, Army Airborne Ranger, policeman and homicide detective, retired teacher and coach, now he is a multi-published author.
Website:http://www.johnfoxjohnhome.com
Facebook author page link: https://www.facebook.com/john.foxjohn
Twitter link: https://twitter.com/johnfoxjohn
Killer Nurse: http://amzn.to/151K0Qd

The New Formula

Sharon Wildwind

I spent the weekend at When Words Collide III. This is a genre writers conference in Calgary, Alberta. If you have any possibility of being in Calgary next year between August 8 to 10, come join us.

Click here for the conference web site, but you might want to wait a couple of weeks before checking it out. There are a lot of tired people catching up on sleep right now.

Here’s three days of convention in 8 words. It’s the new formula for succeeding as a writer.

Passion + marketing plan + social media  + experimentation = publishing success

Passion

If you don’t love your book, no one else will. You have to be passionate about everything connected to your book: story, plot, characters, writing techniques, editing, and the nuts-and-bolts of grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

Marketing plan

Many writers have no background in business or marketing. They rely on business suggestions from family, friends, other writers, agents, editors, and publishers. The bottom line is that writers have to self-educate themselves about business, and the Internet is the best place to start.

All writers should be following one to three business experts. How do you find an expert? You test drive them.

Start with one recommendation. Here’s one: The Creative Penn by Joanna Penn.

Go to her site. Tour around to see what’s on offer. Download or subscribe to anything free that you can, such as a newsletter subscription, RSS feed, blog, free offers, etc.

Try her site for three weeks. Are you getting useful information? If, after three weeks, the answer to that question is no, unsubscribe from that site and move on to the next one.

Eventually you’ll find business experts who speak to your needs. It’s far better to be getting useful information from one to three sources that you read regularly than to have twenty sites bookmarked, but never look at them.

Writers play me-too marketing games. In one of the panels, an author described an inventive twist she’d used in her blog. Faces lit up around the room with people eager to try that twist, too.

Here’s the rub. By the time we hear about something inventive, it’s already been used. When we try to replicate it on our own website, blog, etc. readers’ reactions are likely to be, “Oh, no, not again. So-and-so did this six months ago.”

What we can do instead is to dig for the bones of the idea. What this woman had done was personal, positive, and could be accomplished quickly. So what could I come up with that would be personal, positive, and accomplished quickly? That approach is playing to the strengths of the idea, not being a copy cat.

Social Media

Many writers lack an ability to choose appropriate social media sites for their business because they don’t know what each service provides. It is so daunting to wade through tons of media trying to figure out each one.

Did you know that most sites have an about page? This is a short introduction to what their service is all about, and how to get started using it.

We’d all benefit from reading the about pages and test driving new social media one at a time. I can’t stress that one at a time enough.

If a social media isn't working for you after about three weeks, close out your account and test drive the next one. Again, you’re looking for one to three sites that fit your needs and that you know you would be comfortable using.

In the list below, you’ll notice one glaring absence: Facebook.  I am not anti-Facebook. I just didn’t find their about page contained a lot of helpful information.

Click on the links below for a quick introduction to what each of these social media provide.

Blogspot

Createspace

Goodreads

Google + for business

LinkedIn

Tumblr

Twitter

Wattpad

WordPress

Experiment

The final panel on Sunday afternoon was an update on publishing. Five publishers, five different kinds of presses. Every one of them said now is the time to experiment, experiment, experiment with as many forms of publishing as possible. Here’s a quote from each.

All of us — writers, agents, editors, and publishers — are all on the same side. There are no enemy camps.

~ Jamis Paulson, Turnstone Press

Stop waiting, start trolling the self-publishing world. Kinds of publishing are stops on the journey. The end of publishing has been predicted for five hundred years and it hasn’t happened yet.

~ Adrienne Kerr, Penguin Canada

Publishing is watching culture unfold in front of you. The industry is constantly in flux. Authors need to be experimenting with different kinds of publishing for each of their books. Don’t stop. Writing is great. Write what you love.

~ Samatha Belko, ChiZine Publications

Original voices never go away. Love your book. Predictions are almost always wrong. There are a lot of experiments going on in publishing, and writers should take advantage of that.

~ Hayden Trenholm, Bundoran Press

Futurists are often wrong. It’s often more helpful to go back and look at what happened before rather than guess what will happen next. Chances are any answers given this afternoon will be wrong in one hour.  Publishing is going to be okay.

~ Robert Runte, Five Rivers Chapmanry

Women You Should Know

I was perusing one of my favorite reference books, called THE BOOK OF WOMEN’S FIRSTS; as you might guess, this tome details the names of women who did something first, and yet are not well known for their accomplishments.  

Here are a few examples:

Phoebe Couzins

The first woman to become a U.S. Marshal (1887).

Theresa West Elmendorf

The first woman to be president of the American Library Association (1911).

Carol Esserman

The first woman police officer to kill a suspect in the line of duty (1981).  (Wouldn't you have thought the date would be earlier?)

Susan R. Estrich

The first woman to be president of the Harvard Law Review (1976).

Dorothy Fields

First woman to win an Oscar for song writing (1937).

Emma R. H. Jentzer

First woman special agent of the Bureau of Investigation (Predecessor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation) (1911).

Arabella Mansfield Babb

First woman to be admitted to the bar (1869).

Cissy Medill Patterson

First woman to publish a large metropolitan daily newspaper (1934).

Hazel Brannon Smith

First woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing (1964).

When Tiny Fey became the third woman to win the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2010, she acknowledged that it's important to take note of the women who did things for the first time--and yet she wished we didn't have to do it.  She said, " Apparently, I’m only the third woman ever to receive this 

award, and I’m so honored to . . . be numbered with Lilly Tomlin and Whoopi Goldberg, but I do hope that women are achieving at a rate these days that we can stop counting what number they are things."

It's a good point, but until we reach that moment when women and men are acknowledged equally for impressive work done (always), I think it's good to take note of women's accomplishments as often as we possibly can.

Do you know any impressive women who were the first to accomplish something great?

On Reading and Writing

by Leslie Budewitz
Author of Death al Dente



Leave a comment this weekend to enter the drawing for a free copy of Death al Dente!

For nearly twenty years, I’ve belonged to a monthly book club. Stephen King says if you want to write, you’ve got to read. While I won’t add, “so join a book club,” being part of one has made me a better writer. Why? It’s made me a better reader.

In my first group—started by two couples and still buzzing after thirty-plus years—members chose books by consensus. Alas, I moved. In my current group, the hostess makes the choice. I argued for consensus when we formed, wanting to have a voice in what we chose. Turns out both methods work equally well. Both groups have brought books into my life that I might not have found on my own. When serious readers band together, it’s inevitable that tastes differ, as do sources for recommendations and reasons for choosing a book. Some members audition books, to make sure they’re choosing one they really want to share. Others are less particular, knowing the interaction adds to the experience.

Would we have read Wicked by Gregory Maguire if Jean’s daughter-in-law hadn’t raved about it? Probably not—but then, we’d have missed a seriously weird-ass book and an evening of green food. We would not have read Montana Women, the story of two sisters in the 1950s, if author Toni Volk had not rented Pauline’s guest house.

Joan loves rereading classics: Madame Bovary, Catcher in the Rye, and Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy. Others approach them with trepidation, not wanting to sully the memory of our “first time.” Consider Catcher in the Rye—neither story nor voice is as appealing to an adult reader as to a fifteen-year-old discovering it for the first time and realizing they are not alone in their fears and anxieties.

My own choices have not always been hits: One member reads the popular Montana writer Ivan Doig reluctantly, and groaned when I chose his first book, This House of Sky, a memoir of his sheep-ranching boyhood. I wanted to reread it while working on a historical novel (still unfinished) set in central Montana, to immerse myself in that land. Several members grew up in Montana in the same decades as Doig, and I loved hearing their stories when we gathered. Earlier this year, another member chose Doig’s latest, The Bartender’s Tale, and the reluctant reader admitted enjoying it. It tops my list so far this year. It reminded me, as did The Whistling Season, that some writers simply aren’t convincing storytellers when they stray from their natural subject matter. Doig is at his best in the voice of a young boy verging on adolescence, discovering family secrets, and beginning to see the world in a new light.

Some readers have a higher tolerance for challenging books than others: Arvind Adiga’s satirical novel, The White Tiger, upset one reader who thought it a harsh and unfair portrayal of modern India. Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad, Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, and José Saramago’s Death with Interruptions delighted some and baffled others. My choice of Toni Morrison’s The Mercy forced me to be creative with the food for the evening—no theme dinner opportunities—and to explain why I so admired a book about such a difficult subject: the varieties of slavery in early America. (I’ve read it three times.) And when we discussed my choice of Aimee Bender’s The Peculiar Sadness of Lemon Cake, we had a lively debate about the boundaries of the senses—over lemon tart.

It’s been a gift to meet unfamiliar books: the richly exotic Silk by Allesandro Baracci, The Moonflower Vine by Jetta Carleton, and the delicious The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. (Talk about theme food options!) And popular books I might have skipped: the haunting A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini, the fast-paced evocation of the 1930s, The Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, and the delightful but poignant The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Anne Schaeffer and Annie Burrows.

Occasionally, we’ve all loved the book—which can shorten discussion, although a social or political issue may spark conversations beyond the page: Jamie Ford’s Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet prompted a discussion of the treatment of Chinese and Japanese Americans during “the war,” as well as “the road not taken.” For me, it prompted thoughts of a landscape destroyed by progress—my work in progress is set in Seattle, as is Ford’s book, and the area where his characters lived is vastly changed, much of it lost first to industrialization and now to professional sports arenas. I think of those characters as I write, wanting to keep in my mind the influence of their lives and experiences on the city and its current residents.

The best discussion ever has to have been of the one book we all hated, A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goldrick. I felt badly for Peggy, our newest member at the time: her first choice had been unavailable, so she settled for a bookseller’s last-minute recommendation. But we laughed so hard—and her coconut cake was so good—that the book quickly became beside the point.

Like many writers, I keep a notebook filled with observations on everything I read, noting what works for me and what doesn’t, phrases I like, things I’d do differently. It’s richer because I spend an evening a month with women who love to read and to cook, and who encourage me as a writer. So, to paraphrase Stephen King, if you want to write, join a book club!


Leave a comment this weekend to enter the drawing for a free copy of Death al Dente!
************
Death al Dente, first in the Food Lovers' Village Mysteries, debuted from Berkley Prime Crime on August 6. The series is set in a small, lakeside resort community in Northwest Montana, on the road to Glacier Park, near where author Leslie Budewitz lives. Leslie is also a lawyer. Her first book, Books, Crooks & Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law & Courtroom Procedure (Quill Driver Books) won the 2011 Agatha Award for Best Nonfiction. Visit her at http://www.LeslieBudewitz.com.

Nobody Knows Where You Are

by Sheila Connolly

I've probably touched on the topic of childhood imagination and free play before, but not long ago the point was driven home again.

On my recent trip to Italy a group of us were talking about what we used to do for "play" as children, in the halcyon days of the nineteen-fifties.  Back then, parents weren't hovering over us or scheduling back to back activities to make sure we used every precious hour wisely (and in a way that would get us into a good college and assure our career path forever—ha!).  And back then we also had "recess" during which our teachers threw us out onto a sketchy playground and told us to have fun for half an hour.

We did.  When I was in elementary school, we had a "gang" of sorts (it was a small class, maybe thirty kids total, and our gang was five or six people, who I can still name today).  On the playground we often acted out what we'd seen recently on television, or more often, distilled it into the generic plot:  a bunch of guys rode horses and galloped around and shot at people (the bad guys, I hope), and the lone designated woman of the group stayed home and tidied up the ranch house.  That role was usually assigned to someone we didn't like very much but who really wanted to be part of our group.  (Sorry, Helen, if we scarred you for life.)

At home it was a different story.  We moved into a new house when I was seven, and there were few kids in that neighborhood (we didn't count the mildly retarded boy next door, who was best known for trying to run over his dog with a lawn mower, although he and I did once catch an opossum in a bucket together).  Luckily for me, one of my school friends lived immediately behind our home (immediately in this case was several hundred feet, through a partially wooded area), and for the three years we lived there we were fast friends.

And we had free rein, to go and do whatever we wanted to.  My friend was the last of four children in her family, several years younger than her nearest sibling, and I think her parents had kind of given up on the child-rearing thing.  If there is an antithesis of hovering, they fit the bill.  I had a younger sister, but she was too little and too prissy to join in our somewhat rough adventures, so basically it was the two of us. 

We roamed, we explored.  We investigated abandoned buildings, we went swimming in a creek, we even indulged in a little mild vandalism (don't tell). And what my college classmate said brought that all back:  nobody knew where we were.  Our parents could not have found us without bloodhounds. I admit that even at that age I wondered whether if I fell down and broke my neck, my friend would bother to tell anyone about it, or would just go on about her usual business. And this wasn't in some rural area—this was in a commuter suburb of Philadelphia, although there was still a lot of open space. It was only a couple of miles from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and once we walked that far.

The world is not like that today. It's a wonder that we haven't started embedding a tracking device in our children before they even leave the hospital when they're born (we do it for our pets, don't we?).  We panic when they're out of sight.  We hand off our precious darlings to other (vetted, respectable, trustworthy) parents, making sure they know they're in charge and on duty. We worry, about perverts and kidnappers and accidents.

I don't think my parents were careless or uncaring.  In retrospect, I'm honored that they trusted me, even at seven years old.  I earned that trust, mostly:  I usually told someone where I was going (if "out to play" or "to the woods" is a definition) and when I was told to be back by a certain time, I made sure I was (I had a watch early on).  But I had a lot of freedom, and the adventures we had in those short years are still among my most vivid memories.

Are we cheating our children?  Are we depriving them of creativity and independence?

What Women Know

Elizabeth Zelvin

The women’s movement and changing times during the past fifty years have made many stereotypes about gender differences obsolete. But some generalizations about the difference between men and women still contain a germ of truth. I started thinking about this (not for the first time!) after posting on my Facebook page two brief rants, one about the availability (or not) of women’s shoes in wide widths and the other about the availability (or not) of earrings for unpierced ears. Both posts drew comments from a number of women who understood, and each drew one comment from a puzzled or disbelieving man who simply didn’t have the same information.

I included these in a short list I’m titling (however controversially) “What Women Know.” If you want a mystery tie-in, see Item 1 on bloodstains. Items 2 and 3 come from my experience on Facebook. Items 4 and 5 are based on life experience both personal and professional (as a therapist); I’ve drawn on my observations about food, body image, and eating disorders in one of my mysteries, Death Will Extend Your Vacation. If you can think of others, please comment. If you disagree with my premise, please say it nicely!

1. Cold water, not hot, takes out bloodstains. (Male mystery writers sometimes, but not always, know this too. For women between 12 and 60, it’s inevitable.)
2. It’s very hard to find really pretty shoes in a double-wide width.
3. It’s almost impossible to find delicate or dangly earrings in a clip-on earring (for unpierced ears).
4. Women who eat like truckdrivers and remain slim and beautiful may be throwing up behind closed doors to stay that way. (I wish more male novelists knew this rather than classifying bulimia as a desirable trait in a woman along with blonde hair, long legs, and slim ankles.)
5. Almost no one respects personal boundaries when it comes to body size. Women constantly hear, “Oh, you’ve lost weight!” or “Oh, you’ve gained weight!” from the slightest acquaintances.

Rather than generating a longer list, I offer Alan Jay Lerner’s lyrics from the song “Why Can’t A Woman Be More Like A Man?” from the 1964 musical My Fair Lady, based on the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. I believe four or five of the six items mentioned are still true in the postfeminist world—even in postfeminist households.

Would you be slighted if I didn't speak for hours?
Would you be livid if I had a drink or two?
Would you be wounded if I never sent you flowers?
Well, why can't a woman be like you?

If I were hours late for dinner would you bellow?
If I forgot your silly birthday, would you fuss?
Would you complain if I took out another fellow?
Why can't a woman be like us?

A Bold New Heroine

by Ellen Crosby
Author of Multiple Exposure


My husband warned me. I did listen.

But to be honest, I was unprepared for the number of e-mails and comments on sites like Goodreads and Amazon when the word got out that after six books in the Virginia wine country mysteries, I was switching gears and writing something different.

Here’s what I was thinking: it’s time. I’d written myself into the proverbial corner because The Merlot Murders was originally supposed to be a standalone and I’d always planned to do something different after finishing that book. In fact, what I planned to do was write Multiple Exposure. Yup, it’s true. When I found my old notes in a couple of yellowed notebooks, I blew dust off papers from 2003. 

After six wine country mysteries it was getting harder to play fair with my fans, harder to keep you guessing whodunit, because by now you knew who-didn’t-dun-it in the small-but-charming town of Atoka, Virginia. What I learned from writing those books is a lesson I now pass on to anyone who hopes to be published someday: don’t do what I did. Write on a big canvas and think about a big story with lots of possible arcs for future books—in other words, a series. Make sure you create complex, richly developed characters in a vivid, evocative setting because you’ll probably be spending years of your life with these people and they’d better be worth your time investment. Don’t write just one book where you tie everything up neatly at the end . . . and then have to un-knit it for future stories.

For those who’ve read my wine country mysteries—all of them—how many of you remember Lucie’s sister Mia? To refresh your memory, she drifts out of the picture after The Chardonnay Charade, the second book, and gets a brief mention without actually appearing in The Viognier Vendetta, the fifth one. Enough said.

So back to my dilemma. Sure, I knew people would be unhappy if I stopped writing the wine country mysteries. People loved Lucie—and so do I. But I’m not Arthur Conan Doyle writing about Sherlock Holmes and don’t we all wonder when, not if, J.K. Rowling is going to succumb and write Harry Potter Returns or maybe Son of Harry Potter? What I figured was that you guys liked my writing, my voice, my style, the way I told a story well enough that you’d come with me down a new road with a new character named Sophie Medina, an international photojournalist, a restless, inquisitive, intelligent woman who’s been in war zones, slept in tents in the desert, ridden camels if that was what it took to get where the story was.

Multiple Exposure is darker and edgier than my previous books, so reviewers are calling it a “thriller.” And if I may be permitted to brag (when Sandy asked me to write this post she didn’t tell me I couldn’t, and I’d rather ask forgiveness than permission, anyway), it’s getting some pretty terrific pre-publication reviews about being fast-paced, well-plotted, and, best of all, well-written. But if you’ve read Moscow Nights, my out-of-print British book—occasionally you can find it on UK or Australian used bookstore websites—you’ll know that with Multiple Exposure I’ve come full circle, writing about a journalist in an international setting, because I know about it firsthand.

Why a photographer rather than a journalist? Years ago, I wrote feature stories for The Journal, a now-defunct newspaper that was circulated around the Beltway to the entire Metro Washington, D.C. area, and just before I started writing fiction full-time, I wrote regional features as a freelancer for The Washington Post. Both papers always assigned photographers to my stories and it soon became obvious that the combination of my words and someone else’s picture—I had fabulous photographers—usually landed us on the front page of the metro section. More often than not we were above the fold, which is prime real estate in journalism. Okay, now I’m really done bragging, but when I decided to write Multiple Exposure—take note, and future books—I knew I wanted to write from the perspective of the journalist who was looking for exactly the right picture to tell the story, rather than the right words.

My husband teases me that this new series has been the perfect excuse to call all purchases of camera equipment and books on photography “business expenses,” because I’m such a photography geek, but, hey, who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth? However I’m serious about doing research, just as I was in the wine country mysteries, because the journalist in me wants to get it right. Plus I gave Sophie an amazing grandfather named Charles Lord (much like Lucie’s French grandfather), a man who was one of the original photographers from the iconic Magnum studio, so Henri Cartier-Bresson hired him and he was friends with all of Magnum’s legendary post World War II founders. If you read my books you know I’m also kind of a history nut, so Charles’s background gives me the chance to weave the history of a fascinating era in photojournalism into Sophie’s story.

To answer one final question that I’ve been asked a lot: no, I haven’t closed the door on writing more wine country mysteries. But I sure am having fun writing Sophie Medina’s story.

Ellen Crosby is a former foreign correspondent who now lives in the Washington, DC, area. Learn more about Ellen and both her series at http://www.ellencrosby.com.

Gaetan and Delphine

Sharon Wildwind

When my parents married, my mother’s Uncle Wilton gave them this set of china.

My mother, who I suspect had aspirations the rest of her family never shared, loved to tell how this was a one-of-a-kind, hand-painted set from France.

This china became a part of every holiday meal, and there were rules.

• It was for high holidays only: Thanksgiving; Christmas; New Years; maybe Easter, but it always seemed too heavy and ornate for spring; birthdays; and my parents’ wedding anniversary.
• No acid food, like tomatoes, were served on it because my mother feared the acid would dissolve some of the gold trim and poison us.
• It never went into the dish washer, but was always hand-washed, hand-dried, and put back in the cupboard immediately after the meal.
• You couldn’t ask to leave the table until you’d eaten enough that Gaetan and Delphine — our names for the two people — looked back at you.

Decades past.

I became Gaetan’s and Delphine’s guardian. We never did find either cups or soup bowls when we cleaned out my mother’s storage unit, but we did find almost thirty pieces, much of it chipped and worn, but still serviceable; a few pieces, like this bread-and-butter plate, in great shape.

My husband and I have finally admitted to ourselves and to each other that we have too much darn stuff. We have embarked on a long-term major housecleaning. Last week I stood in the kitchen looking at thirty pieces of china we rarely use.  Was time to keep a couple of pieces for memory’s sake and let the rest go?

I’ve asked other family members if they want the china. No one does and were clear that I could do whatever I wanted with it. I figured if I was going to sell it, I should at least try to track down some more concrete information about when and where it was made.

Guess what?

It is not a one-of-a-kind set; it was not made in France; but it’s likely at least some of it was hand-painted.

This is one of several Eggshell Nautilus patterns produced by the Homer Laughlin China Company of Newell, West Virginia. It was made in May 1944, though I haven’t yet been able to track down in which of the Laughlin factories. I’m fine with that information, and I’m also glad my mother got to keep her illusions all her life.

It has some connection with the Bromley China Company. Their pattern BRM4 also has Gaetan and Delphine on it, but it has a dark red rim. Since the Homer Laughlin and the Bromley marks appear to have been added at different times, I think that Laughlin might have manufactured the china then sent it to Bromley to be gilded.

I posted photographs of the front and back of the bread-and-butter plate on a China search site, and asked if anyone knew anything more about this particular pattern. Here’s the back of the plate.

A woman kindly sent me e-mail that said since the plate was made in 1944, and the back of the plate said War Painted, likely it was painted by German prisoners of war. I hated to tell her that it really said Warranted — which refers to the 22-karet gold used — but that the second “r” on this one piece had worn so that it looked like a “p”. Darn, that would have made a great addition to the Gaetan and Delphine family stories.

Let me encourage you, while you still can, to ask family members about precious possession that have fostered and nurtured family stories over the years. Photograph those pieces. Write down the stories people tell you. Don’t worry if they are true or not. You can always research later, but first try to capture what these special objects mean to people.

So are Gaetan and Delphine going to show up in a story? Likely. It's even more likely despite our major housecleaning that I will hang on them for a while. They have a few more holiday meals left in them. I just wish we could have found those cups and soup bowls.
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Quote for the week
And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.
~ Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club