Lea Wait's Blog, page 123

Weekend Update: December 5-6, 202

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Brenda Buchanan (Monday), John Clark (Tuesday), Joe Souza (Thursday) and Maggie Robinson (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

 

 

 

 

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

Believing in Your Right to Write

Kate Flora: As many of you know, I spent ten years in the unpublished writers’ corner,[image error] eight before I got an agent and two more before my first book saw the light. It was a hard ten years, a decade that many aspiring authors find so discouraging they give up. It is very hard to stay on track, to keep writing and rewriting, when all the system offers in return in rejection. If I weren’t a stubborn Yankee, I probably would have quit, too.

It’s hard to call yourself a writer even if you’ve answered the call to write. If you admit that you’re writing, the first question often asked is: Are you published? Have I read anything you’ve written? It’s hard to answer that you’re not yet published. I used to give my students a writing prompt involving being at a party and being asked if they were published, and when the answer was no, the questioner walked away.

I used to ask my students questions to help them understand themselves as writers, and to give them insight into their habits with regard to their writing.

Did they give themselves a dedicated time to write? Were they faithful about it?

Did they have a place to write where they could be undisturbed, a place that supported their desire to write, or did they write at the kitchen table surrounded by family or household demands?When did they do their assignments, and were they willing to give writing the time or did they tend to blow it off if something else was offered?

[image error]I used to give them a sign that read: Not Now, I’m Writing. I used to tell that only they would know whether the sign needed to go on the outside of their writing space door, to keep people away or on the inside to remind them that they needed to stay there and write.

It’s a sad fact that as writers, we have to be our own cheerleaders. We have to be the ones who believe in the importance of our writing, of our passion for storytelling. Often, we have to defend that against the demands of our jobs, our families, and our other interests.

I tell aspiring writers that waiting for the fluttery little muse to land on their shoulders and inspire them to write doesn’t usually work. I use the dreaded word “discipline” as often as I use the word “inspiration.” Because if you don’t make the choice to have a dedicated time to write, even on the days when the writing is gravel, you won’t be there when the muse arrives, when the characters take off and begin talking to you, when your story comes so fast you can barely type the words, and when the process is so exciting it leaves you breathless.

You have the right to write because it matters to you, even if getting published is hard. The first relationship is between you and your story. It’s a challenge to acquire the habit of rewriting, or shaping that story so it is the best it can be. But that’s your job, if you want to be a writer, because, cliché though it may be, writing is both inspiration and perspiration.

And even when you have a work that is a polished as you can make it, no one is ever going to knock on the door and demand to see your work. Which is why even if you’ve opened yourself to inspiration, applied discipline, and embraced rewrite, you’re going to need the hide of an alligator to deal with the world of publishing.

But developing the hide of an alligator? That’s for another day.

[image error]

Weird Stuff in our Mailbox

[image error]Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, today blogging about one of the things just about everyone has experienced since last March—having items we’d ordinarily buy in a store sent through the mail or by UPS or FedEx instead. I live in a rural part of Maine, far enough from the center of any town that home delivery from grocery stores isn’t available. Heck, we can’t even get a pizza delivered out here. In fact, for food shopping, only Walmart has curbside pickup. Hannaford and Food City offer early senior shopping hours , but no way am I getting up at 5 AM and rushing off to the grocery store. The older I get, the more time it takes for the coffee to kick in and shopping without a fully-engaged brain is never a sound idea.

So, a couple of times a week, one of us does a quick, organized, well-masked run to buy food and other essentials and to check our P.O. Box for mail and packages, which brings me back to the topic of this post—some of the strange things we’ve been sent during the pandemic.

Books and puzzles don’t count, of course. I’d be ordering them anyway, and none of those political flyers back before the elections ever made it past the recycle bin at the post office. Since I prefer to pay bills by check, we still get a few of those every month, but what we now see a lot more of are those yellow cards that mean a package has arrived.

[image error]Probably the most surprising item turned up last month. Actually, there were two packages, one for each of us . . . from our insurance company. Since my husband is a retired state employee, we’re both covered by an Aetna Medicare program. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than many, and I have had reason to be grateful for it this year. Aetna annoys us by constantly phoning to tell us we’re entitled to free home visits, despite the fact that we’ve repeatedly told them we’re not about to let a stranger into the house, especially now. We get regular physicals, thank you very much. Which our insurance company ought to know, since they pay for them. Sorry—just needed to rant about that for a minute. Back to the packages. In a rather more sensible attempt to look after us old folks, each contained what Aetna apparently considers pandemic essentials: a thermometer, a box of bandaids, three purple face masks with the Aetna logo prominently displayed, a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush, hand sanitizer, sunscreen, dry eye drops, and cough drops.

Early on, we tried ordering cat food from Chewy.com. The service was fine, but Shadow is a fussy eater. None of the boxed combinations suited Her Highness, leading to waste, and ordering nothing but single cans of the flavors she prefers, which weren’t always in stock, got old fast. We’re back to picking up assorted patés at the grocery store.

[image error]I’ve always tended to shop by brands, preferring to stick with those I know we like for foodstuffs and with those that offer specific benefits in the case of other supplies. Take vitamins. I’d been buying the kind aimed at people 65+ at Walmart . . . until we stopped going into Walmart. Neither Food City nor Hannaford carries them, so now I order them by mail. Okay, I admit it. I’m using Amazon Prime so I don’t have to pay postage. Sorry small businesses, but if you don’t have what I’m looking for, I have to get it somewhere. What else have I ended up buying that way? It’s an odd list—mostly things I’d normally buy while grocery shopping but haven’t been able to find in 2020. Just to name two: freezer tape and dish cloths. Oh, and crew socks, which I wear around the house in lieu of going barefoot and used to get at Walmart. Who needs shoes when you’re not going out?

I’ve also mail ordered a few things for hefty prices where the profits were going to good causes. It’s a good thing it was a good cause in the case of some face masks because they not only took forever to arrive but they turned out to be too small to fit my husband’s face and not particularly comfortable for me to wear. They’re cute, though. And the photo at the beginning of this blog? That’s Sandy in the face mask specially designed to go under his ski helmet. That was ordered by mail, too.

 

[image error]

So, dear readers—what about you? What weird or wonderful items have you received via USPS, UPS, or FedEx during the last long months?

***

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-three books traditionally published and has self published several children’s books. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Currently she writes the contemporary “Deadly Edits” series (A Fatal Fiction) as Kaitlyn. As Kathy, her most recent book is a standalone historical mystery, The Finder of Lost Things. She maintains websites at www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com. A third, at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women, is the gateway to over 2300 mini-biographies of sixteenth-century Englishwomen.

 

All Hail the MacGuffin

I had a very long and unhappy screed teed up about the Senatorial race here in Maine, the disingenuous clowning of Bill Green pretending he was only doing a favor for a friend, and how nativism in the state becomes a kind of xenophobia and holds us back, but I figured the whole thing was too raw at the moment. So let’s talk about MacGuffins.

The classic MacGuffin definition comes from a tale ascribed to Alfred Hitchcock.

Two men are riding on a train. One asks the other, “What’s in that black box on the luggage rack?”

“A MacGuffin.”

“What does it do.”

“It catches lions on the Scottish Highlands.”

“But there are no lions on the Scottish Highlands.”

“Oh? Then, that’s a MacGuffin.”

Typically enigmatic for the round mound of conundrum. [image error]The term shows up earlier in history, but he’s most often credited with inventing it.
Technically speaking, the MacGuffin is the object (or situation or other fictional event) that may be integral to the plot of a book or movie, but is not very important in and of itself. The classic example of the MacGuffin is the statuette of the black-painted gold bird [image error]in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade and several criminal types all compete to gain possession of the jeweled statue of a falcon. Ultimately (SPOILER ALERT), the statuette that comes into the movie is fake. The real one is still missing at the end of the film. The falcon only exists as an object for the principals to seek—it might as well have been the letters of transit in Casablanca or the briefcase in Pulp Fiction.

I’m interested in MacGuffins right now because I had to invent one a couple months ago. I’m working on an odd little novel, not part of the Elder Darrow series, that involves a disgraced Army veteran and a couple of Federal politicians working in opposition to each other. But I was seriously stuck as to why they were all in conflict until I realized I needed something all parties needed to possess very badly, for different reasons. Once I had invented the MacGuffin, I was sailing.

A MacGuffin, of course, has to relate to the characters. Alfred Hitchcock is also quoted as saying that in The 39 Steps, the MacGuffin was “the thing the spies were after but the audience doesn’t care.” [image error]In other words, because the characters were spies, they had to be after something worthy of their roles. Those spies would not likely care in the same way about a jewel-encrusted statue. It would make a different story.

Which begs the question of whether you can write a crime novel without using a MacGuffin. To the extent that a MacGuffin motivates the plot, no. If you look at the MacGuffin as the object of a character or characters’ desire, then something like a MacGuffin is always necessary—if a character hasn’t a desire, you don’t have a story.

The MacGuffin doesn’t need to be a physical object. The object of desire can be a character’s vindication, an apology, power, hatred—essentially anything that moves the characters, whether the heroes or the villains.

Of course, the MacGuffin has to be worthy of the effort for the characters seeking it. Criminals do bad things for an end, not simply because they’re criminals. As do heroes. The logic may not be immediately apparent to a reader, but a character has to have a reason to seek the MacGuffin.

What makes a good MacGuffin? First, it must relate to the characters in your story somehow. Their desire for it must not change during the course of the plot, unless forced to by the story. And it can’t seem phony to the reader, jimmied in for the sake of the narrative.

In the case of the novel I’m working on, the MacGuffin turned out to be a small collection of photographs that all the principals wanted, for different reasons. But I had to justify each character’s interest in the photos with a believable and adequate motive. As with any fictional technique, you must be very careful not to pull back the curtain on the MacGuffin wizard and reveal the artifice of what you’re doing.

Weekend Update: November 28-29, 2020

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Dick Cass (Monday), Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Tuesday), Kate Flora (Thursday) and Vaughn Hardacker (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

 

 

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

It was a dark and stormy night… or day… remembering is as hard as consistent writing

Ooops! I bet you expected this about 12 hours ago. Sorry! Blame the tryptophan in the turkey. Or that being home all the time makes it hard to remember what day it is. The days just all melt together into one increasingly colder darker blur. That sounds ominous. It’s not — I’m talking about the seasons changing, not the coming apocalypse or whatever.

Anyway, one thing that’s made November different from the rest of the bulr is that, after years of rejecting the idea, I’m doing NaNoWriMo. For those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s short for National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 50,000 words between Nov. 1 and 30. There’s a cool website that keeps track of words, shows a graph with progress and how many words a day you’re doing and how many you have to do to meet te goal. It even has chat groups for those who feel the need (I don’t).

While it promises those who succeed will have a novel by the end of the month, we writers all know that’s not really the case. Not that 50,000 words is chicken feed, but it’s not a novel. Which isn’t to say it’s not worthwhile to do it. It is. The biggest reason I needed it was to force myself to fit writing into a busy worklife. I can complain about having no time all I want, but that doesn’t get the book written.

The other reason, for me at least, that 50,000 words isn’t close to being a novel, is that I can whip off 2,000 words at the drop of a hat. I’m not bragging. People have different writing processes, and mine is to get it all down on the page and then go back and add in setting, fix what words I use, fix plot points, smooth out the writing and more.  I usuall end up with a “first draft” of about 115,000, then go back and find the book in it.

I have a friend who’s said he’s thought of doing NaNo, but it scares him. To him and all writers, I say do it anyway. It’s free. You don’t have to worry about having a finished novel at the end — the important end result is that it builds the writing habit.

And by the way, in case the whole “cold and dark” thing made you think I don’t like November, I do! Even in pandemic world, I like the entry into winter and settling in thing the world does, especially up here in Maine.

It certainly has its own beauty, despite the fact most of the foliage is gone, along with the green. Below are two photos I took around sunrise on two different mornings at the Belgrade boat landing on Route 27. Both times I was on an important errand (OK, probably on my way to the Augusta Panera or McDonald’s). But even in November, even if you’re writing, or working, or feeling undone by all the weirdness, it’s worth it to take a minute or two and enjoy the things that go on anyway. Like the sun coming up.

[image error] [image error]

 

Sharing Our Holiday Traditions

Today, Maine Crime Writers are sharing some of our holiday traditions and if you have the time and inclination, we’d love to have you, our readers, share some of yours as well.

Kate Flora: Thanksgiving on the farm was often the one time of year when relatives gathered–all the aunts and uncles who back then seemed very old. In typical Maine fashion, the women gathered to cook while the men donned their red and black checked woolens, grabbed their guns, and headed out to the woods to hunt. No TV and footballs games for us. When the men returned, there would be dinner, and then the men sat and talked while the women cleaned up. Until the year that my feminist mother shocked and outraged my father and the assembled elders by instituting a new way to clean up: everyone would draw numbers, and then, in pairs, everyone would take turns with the dishes. It was quite a sight to see the aproned uncles, sleeves rolled up, tackling a sink full of soapy water, possibly for the first times in their lives.

[image error] [image error]

John Clark: Way back when, card playing was a big part of the Clark Thanksgiving along with my hunting in the morning. Oh Hell was the came of choice, but after everyone had kids, we got away from playing and did things like explore the fields when the weather permitted. Since Mom died, the traditions have changed with Sennebec Hill Farm no longer ours. We alternated between Concord, Ma and Hartland for quite some time, but age, the energy expended on caring for others (both very old and very young), made travel daunting. For the past couple years, we’ve alternated between our older daughter’s place in Belgrade and our place in Waterville. Fewer dishes are on the menu, replaced by things like reading to Reid and Piper as well as Piper’s favorite activity here, having me twirl her in my computer chair or carry her around upside down like a sack of beans. I’m in the process of teaching her to play rummy, so card playing may soon return to our Thanksgiving traditions.

Sandra Neily here:  My childhood Thanksgiving meant close times with cousins at the young person table where we all gathered in Portland at grandmother “Munnie’s” house. (I am on the right, mid-way, long hair and bangs.) In our family, you didn’t make it to the adult table until college-age … or later. My grandfather was president of a national rose association. Sent outdoors to wait, we played endless tag up and down his garden rows. No shortcuts through beds though. Serious thorns and lots more fun than the big person table I think.

[image error]

The big Thanksgiving event played out just before that gathering: deer season. The family’s men gathered up near Cherryfield in a place called Bull Hill in a one room hunting camp with bunk beds, one stove, and probably too many baked beans. The mount of that buck’s head and antlers, seen in this photo of my father’s jeep mired at an angle in mud, is on my Moosehead Lake camp wall.

[image error]



[image error]

I was always sad to be left out, but probably ignorant of what living in a one room cabin with lots of un-showered, unshaven, beans-eating men would be like. I used those left-out feelings in my first novel.

Excerpt from DEADLY TRESPASS:

Twenty minutes and ten miles east of town, I parked below moss-covered racks where Conover hunters hung game off the ground. I don’t hunt, but I could have. I wanted to change male traditions by calling myself Patton, but each fall the “Bring Your Rifle Leave Your Woman”sign hung on Antler Camp’s door.

Each fall my mother and I sharpened knives and cut butcher paper into squares until my father’s Jeep, groaning under deer tied on the hood and jammed-together uncles, pulled into our yard. Grinning like royalty, my brother, Giffy, rode a pile of guns in the backseat. I decided hunting had to be overrated if it hurt so much to be left out.

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is one from 1951, when my entire small family on my father’s side got together at my grandparents’ house. The only one missing is my cousin Fred, who was in the military at the time/

[image error]

Losing Mimi

Not quite a month ago, I lost a dear friend of more than 30 years to the coronavirus—Madeline Schofer Smith, a feisty redhead of German descent some 85 years young. Still can’t wrap my mind around it, let alone my broken heart.

Truth be told, Madeline wasn’t an easy person. A sweet little old lady one minute, she could come off as flinty, cold, and ready to rumble the next—that Teutonic bloodline, I figure. My own grandmother was German to the core, so I’m familiar with that odd mix of loving and prickly.

Mimi began her career with Bell Telephone (later NE Telephone) as a switchboard operator in 1953, climbing the ladder to ad exec until retiring some 43 years later. Seems they weren’t quite done with her even then, however, luring her back to single-handedly edit the yellow pages for the entire New England area—a job she continued doing well into her second retirement even as her worsening macular degeneration forced her to use a magnifying glass to get the job done.

[image error]

She was in her thirties when she met and married Paul Smith, a man who shared her love of music, art, and travel. When he developed cancer a few years later and was forced into a wheelchair, travel became more problematic. It was during this time that the King Tut exhibit came to Washington, DC, something Paul was desperate to see, so this plucky, five-foot powerhouse drove him the 483 miles to the Capital, pushing his wheelchair through the entire exhibit herself. He died shortly after their return.

Music was Mimi’s life—all the more so after she lost Paul. The Manchester Choral Society and the various orchestras with whom she played viola for decades became de facto families. She also volunteered in the orchestras’ administrative offices, which is where I first encountered her in my capacity as Communications Director. Mimi, I quickly learned, adored all things British monarchy, and was a stickler for both proper grammar and correct musical notation. Things were always to be done In A Certain Way—thank you very much.

Tuesday morning, September 11th, 2001, as the office bustled with final preparations for our upcoming season-opening concert, Mimi barreled in, breathless with the news that the Twin Towers had fallen. Shocked and uncomprehending, I was quickly pulled into the comfort of her enormous, pillowed bosom. Our friendship was cemented by the consolation she offered all of us on that awful day. We became more than colleagues; we were from that point on sisters of the heart, occasional dinner companions and members of the symphony’s Ladies Who Lunch.

In mid-September, Mimi fractured a vertebra and injured her wrist in a fall from her second floor landing, ending up in a rehabilitation facility for several weeks. Another fall not long afterward sent her back to rehab—this time never to return. We attempted to phone her numerous times, eventually being told she’d been quarantined, infected by the coronavirus during a recent outbreak at the facility. A slew of comorbidities (diabetes, the macular degeneration from which she’d long suffered and, most recently, ovarian cancer) left her with little energy to fight the disease. Days later, this amazing woman was lost to us.

RIP, Mimi—you gutsy lady, you. You’ll be deeply missed.

[image error]

Darcy Scott (Winner, 2019 National Indie Excellence Award; Best Mystery, 2013 Indie Book Awards; Silver Award, 2013 Readers Favorite Book Awards; Bronze Prize, 2013 IPPY Awards) is a live-aboard sailor and experienced ocean cruiser with more than 20,000 blue water miles under her belt. For all her wandering, her summer home and favorite cruising grounds remain along the coast of Maine—the history and rugged beauty of its sparsely populated out-islands serving as inspiration for much of her fiction, including her popular Maine-based Island Mystery Series. Her debut novel, Hunter Huntress, was published in Britain in 2010.

Bill Bryson: An Author Driven By Curiosity About Nearly Everything

Of the very few books that are enduring residents on my night table Bill Bryon’s “A History of Nearly Everything” sits right on top. At 500-plus pages, it’s no small read so I’ll have bedtime company for a long while. And what a read it is! You begin with “How To Build A Universe”, move through “The Size of The Earth”, and twenty-nine chapters later learn about “The Restless Ape”.

[image error]



[image error]

Forsaking the “writing the what you know” admonition Bryson tackled a subject about which he knew virtually nothing and penned an international best seller.

(Since number 5 in my “Maine Oceanographer Mara Tusconi” mysteries will feature sharks, a topic about which I am essentially ignorant, that’s encouraging.)

“A History of Nearly Everything” was a big undertaking,” Bryson once said.  “It required speaking to academics, scientists and researchers in those fields. The thing I found with scientists is that they really appreciate it when you ask what interests them in spending their lives studying moss or lichen or snails… when no one has ever asked them before.”

As nobody every asked me why I devoted my doctoral work to “impacts on nitrogen loading on epiphytic salt marsh algae” I can certainly relate to that.

“One of my favorite anecdotes in the book was about the contempt in which physicists hold scientists from other fields,” Bryson once said, laughing. “The Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli was floored when his wife left him for a chemist. ‘Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood, but a chemist?’ ”

[image error]

Bryson’s most recent “The Body A Guide For Occupants” couldn’t have come at a better time given the number of Corona virus myths floating around (e.g., drinking alcohol does not protect you against the virus and 5 G mobile networks don’t spread it (people really believe these things??). “The Body A Guide” explains thousands of tasks our body takes care of as we go about our day. The book has been called informative, entertaining and “sometimes gross” (kissing, according to one study, transfers up to one billion bacteria from one mouth to another, along with 0.2 micrograms of food bits).

Bill Bryson, also author of “A Walk In The Woods”, “I’m A Stranger Here Myself” and 20 or so more books announced his retirement from book writing in 2020, sadly but understandably so.

Weekend Update: November 21-22, 2020

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Charlene D’Avanzo (Monday), Darcy Scott (Tuesday), and Maureen Milliken (Friday). We’ll have a Group Post on Thanksgiving Traditions on Wednesday and be taking Thursday off.

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

Here’s a chance to read MCW alum Jen Blood’s book for free:

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

 And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora