Lea Wait's Blog, page 145

Travels With Mom

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. As reflected by the relationship between Liss MacCrimmon and her mother, Violet, in A View to a Kilt and earlier mysteries in the series, my relationship with my mother was not always smooth, but in August of 1987, not too long after my father died, she wanted to come north from her home in Florida one last time to visit family and old friends and I offered to drive. We spent two weeks on the road and it was a good experience for both of us. I also learned a lot of family history along the way.

[image error]

My mom in 1987 at age 77

As we drove through parts of New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, we talked a lot about Mom’s childhood on a farm/boardinghouse in Hurleyville, New York. (You can read more about the family and the boardinghouse at http://www.kathylynnemerson/hornbeck.htm) She was born in 1910, when such establishments were everywhere in rural Sullivan County, catering to folks from New York City who wanted to escape the summer heat.

[image error]

my mother’s aunt, mom, her father, and her grandparents in 1915

I remember asking her about a term I’d always found confusing as it was used in the early twentieth century. Today a casino is associated with gambling, but back in the good old days, it just meant a dance floor. The only gambling my mother remembered from her childhood occurred on the front porch of the family farm, where her uncles played poker. She recalled her grandfather warning them to be sure to hide the money if the local state trooper drove by.

[image error]

casino at Lake Ophelia, Liberty, NY

When we stopped in Trumbull, Connecticut to visit my father’s brother and his wife, I heard another great story. It seems that when my uncle was born, in January 1904, his father went by sleigh to fetch the doctor. On the way back, the sleigh overturned and the doctor was dumped into a snowbank. Despite this mishap, my uncle was safely delivered, but he was such a tiny baby that the doctor told his father, hopefully in jest, that he “wasn’t worth bringing up.” My uncle referred to this doctor as she, but didn’t know her name. It was only recently that I discovered that she was Dr. Phoebe Champlin Low of Liberty, New York. It turns out she was my grandfather’s second cousin, which may explain her rather cavalier comment—that and the fact that she was in her late sixties at the time.

On a side jaunt by ferry from Connecticut to Long Island, we visited my mother’s cousin in Nesconset and those poker-playing uncles came up again. It seems that the older brother was dating the resident schoolteacher before he joined up to fight in World War I. While he was gone, his younger brother began seeing her. When this situation came to light after the war, it did not go over well with brother number one. The two of them stopped speaking to each other entirely, relaying everything they had to say to each other through a third party, often my mother. Since the brothers shared a room in the family farmhouse (and in the barn during the summer season when the house was full of boarders), this must have been interesting while it lasted.

[image error]

Mom’s oldest uncle

I also heard a third story concerning my mother’s uncles. It seems the family had a map that supposedly led to an Indian lead mine. In the days when New York was New Netherlands, Indians mined lead and took it to smelters to have bullets made. My mother recalled that the map was kept in “the blue trunk” at the farm while one of her cousins remembered seeing it in a chest in their aunt’s bedroom. Wherever it was stored, no one knows what happened to it, but at one point the uncles, together with their father and two of their brothers-in-law, set off for Sundown, a very rural area some distance north of the farm, in the hope of following the map to the mine. It turned out that a stream had changed course over the centuries, making that impossible, but the trip wasn’t a total waste. The uncles got a huge kick out of the fact that the locals, seeing five men in a big black car on a Sunday, thought they must be gangsters. This was, after all, the era when Murder Inc. made a practice of dumping the bodies of murdered mobsters in Sullivan County.

[image error]

With the January 2020 publication of A View to a Kilt, Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett will have had sixty-one books traditionally published. 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 Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries and the “Deadly Edits” series as Kaitlyn. As Kathy, her most recent book is a collection of short stories, Different Times, Different Crimes but there is a new, standalone historical mystery in the pipeline. She maintains three websites, at www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com and another, comprised of over 2000 mini-biographies of sixteenth-century English women, at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women.

 

Weekend Update: February 1-2, 2020

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

Adventures in Research

Since readers are often curious about how we develop our stories, we thought we’d end the month of January by sharing some of the adventures we’ve had over the years doing research. As you will see, not all of our research involves looking in books. Sometimes we have to leave our desks to spend time with people who have the expertise we need.

Kate Flora: Before I became I writer, I used to think that what writers did was sit at their desks and make things up. Many years of crime writing–writing for a crime-savvy audience–has disabused me of that idea. Now I look forward to those times when I can leave my desk and go out into the world to ask questions. One of my favorite adventures in research was while I was up in Miramichi, New Brunswick, doing research for Death Dealer: How Cops and Cadaver Dogs Brought a Killer to Justice. One night, the detective I was working with asked me if I wanted to go on a stake-out. Of course I said yes. So he picked me up, and we drove to an industrial park where thieves had been stealing copper pipe. Far across the park, I spotted a white station wagon tucked down below a knoll. “What about that car?” I said. “What is it doing here?” Lo and behold, I’d spotted the thieves. I got to watch the arrest, the moment when the suspect produced a “receipt” from the owner, authorizing him to collect the copper, and even go to visit the supposed writer of the receipt who said it was bogus.

Vaughn C. Hardacker: For my second thriller novel, The Fisherman, I wanted a remote location where a person who wanted to leave society and all its problems behind might live off the grid. A friend lent me a novel written by a retired Maine game warden entitled A Warden’s Worry (the title immediately caught my eye as a warden’s worry is the name of a popular fishing dry fly here in Maine). The novel was about a Korean War veteran who upon return from the war was suffering from PTSD (although he was not aware of it) and wanted to get away. He rides a train and gets off at a place called Howe Brook Village. During the 1950s and early 1960s the north Maine woods was undergoing an infestation by the Spruce Budworm a pest that attacked and killed trees. The logging companies created a town that could be brought into a remote place in the woods on a railroad flatcar. They constructed a small village consisting of a hotel/general store/post office and a number of cabins for the number of cabins for the loggers to live in.

[image error]

St Croix Lake and Howe Brook

Once they had harvested all of the trees they wanted, the village was taken down, reloaded on the flatcars and moved up the line to the next location. The protagonist lived in one of the cabins and stayed after the site was taken away. I immediately took my copy of the DeLorme Maine Atlas and Gazetteer and found Howe Brook on the shore of Saint Croix Lake on map 58 at location C-4. I immediately knew I had to go there. I knew immediately that it was going to be an adventure when I realized that the nearest town was Masardis on route 11. Masardis consisted of a bridge over the Aroostook River and a single store (which has since burned down). Not to belabor this, from Masardis we followed unpaved woods roads for forty miles. I was about to give up when I rounded a curve I was surprised to see a street sign that said Main Street (it probably should have read Only Street) beside what was formerly the tracks of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad. I turned right onto Main Street, drove across the beaver dam and found myself in the midst of six cabins (one of which was the actual cabin used in both the warden’s novel and mine). I had found my off grid location. It is so far off the grid that the power company does not have electrical lines in there. So if you plan on going to Howe Brook Village, bring your own generator.

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: This is an adventure from some time ago (almost 15 years, to be exact), but I was reminded of it recently when I saw the following real estate ad: https://www.christiesrealestate.com/sales/detail/170-l-775-f1608200308700004/117-jetty-road-islesboro-me-04848

Back when I was working on Lethal Legend, the fourth book in my Diana Spaulding Mystery Quartet, which is partially set on a fictional island near Islesboro in 1888, my husband and I decided a research trip/mini-vacation was in order. So off we went by ferry to Islesboro to spend a couple of days discovering what life on a real island off the coast of Maine is like. We made reservations to stay at the Dark Harbor House. There actually aren’t many places to stay on the island, and this one was expensive, but it was also built just after the period I was writing about, so I was hoping to get a “feel” for life among the well-to-do at the end of the nineteenth century. Boy, did I. It turned out that the mansion-turned-hotel was about to go back to being a private home and on the second night we were there, we were the only guests. The owners kindly gave me permission to wander freely through the rooms and immerse myself in the ambiance of that bygone age. If you follow the link to the photos in the real estate ad, you’ll see what I mean. Yes, I could have written the novel from photographs alone, but in this instance the experience of doing on-hands research was definitely worthwhile (and fun!)

Susan Vaughan:  I’ve written about this adventure—more correctly, misadventure—before, but it certainly fits the title of this group post. When I was writing Ring of Truth, I needed direct information for the backstory, which involves a theft of crown jewels at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. A conference of the Romance Writers of America in D.C. offered an easy opportunity to interview with the manager of security and to see the layout of the room where the fictional theft takes place. I set up an appointment ahead, explaining I was a novelist doing book research. Before my

[image error]

Crown jewels, gifts from Napoleon

meeting with the manager of security (I’ll call him Smith here. You’ll see why.), I took time to see the exhibits in the Hall of Geology, Gems and Minerals on the second floor where the Hope Diamond and other jewels are displayed. Security was visible all around—guards standing at alert, cameras on the ceiling. \ I then made my way to the security headquarters in the basement, down a long hallway. Smith met with me in an outer office, me beside the secretary’s desk, him leaning against a table. A burly guard stood by. I again explained to Smith my purpose, then stated that the burglary in my story took place years previously and I wondered if my scenario was at all possible. As I ran through it, his blank cop face morphed into a hostile mask. He insisted no burglary could happen under his watch and guards could never be involved. He demanded I not write the story as an inside job. It couldn’t happen, he said. All this time the burly guard and the secretary remained riveted on our conversation. Smith leaned back, arms folded, and speculated I might not be who I claimed to be. Perhaps I was using this meeting as a ruse to set up my own crime. I quickly dug out my proof, such as it was. When I handed Smith bookmarks and my driver’s license, the guard and the secretary asked for bookmarks. “For my wife,” said the guard. The boss ignored them—and my proof. He was done. He directed the guard to escort me out of the museum. With adrenaline roaring in my ears, I trudged down the hall, up the stairs, and all the way to the door leading to Constitution Avenue. I may be the only author to be kicked out of the Museum of Natural History.  

John Clark-Librarians get plenty of unusual research requests, often from unexpected patrons. One I remember came from two doctors at the old Augusta Mental Health Institute. An older patient had been to a specialist who suggested a Classman’s Level. Both of them were stumped as neither had ever heard of such a test. Ten minutes later, I had the answer, the specialist was referring to a 4-prong cane to aid in walking.

One of the more unusual research requests (actually a series of them) turned out to have a most unexpected result. One of my patrons at the Boothbay Harbor Library was taking an online graduate program in counseling. The books and articles she needed were fairly esoteric, but thanks to my mental health library connections and the great lending program at the Maine State Library, I was able to obtain most everything she needed. She and her husband were live-in managers of a popular resort in the area. When a new owner fired them and gave the couple 2 days to move, they panicked and called me for assistance. That turned into their offering me a mind boggling array of items as they were in a bind. I ended up filling my truck with everything from sterling silver to maple syrup and organic pancake mix, demonstrating that research can easily produce unexpected results.

Charlene D’Avanzo: In the days of tie-dye and Earth Day’s birth I was a grad student studying at the Maine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA. Since my work was coastal, an invitation to join a research cruise to the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean was a rare opportunity, and I took it.

All these years later, I’ve used vivid images from that experience – countless rafts of Sargassum seaweed that harbor baby turtles and dolphins turned bioluminescent-blue in the ship’s bow wake at night – in the upcoming book of my Maine Oceanographer Mara Tusconi series.

My grad student self would never, ever, have imagined this turn of events!

Too Many . . .

Too many funerals this year, he says, as he eyes the locomotive of his own old age steaming down the tracks: first, Lea Wait, of course, [image error]then a well-loved friend and colleague of Anne’s at the New Hampshire school where she used to teach, and most recently, the husband of a friend: a Colby professor from the years when we attended that institution. What struck me most at the memorials for these very accomplished and much-honored people was that, despite their prizes, the public recognition, the external successes, without exception what the survivors remembered most was relationships, the support these people had given them, the many intangible gifts of love, companionship, mentorship, the pleasures of meals shared, conversations, and merely presence

I’m probably as greedy as any of my writing peers for publication, honors, awards, recognition of the work that I do, that like all writers, is performed out of sight and away from anyone admiring our discipline and efforts. But it does seem to me, after listening to the memories both friends and family shared, that in the unlikely event I do go, I would rather be remembered for the quality of my friendship, the welcome I gave to people, the meals we shared, and the relationships, than anything else I’ve done.

I recently rediscovered an Oregon writer, Brian Doyle. Dead from a brain tumor at the young age of sixty, he was a writer of as beautiful and delicate essays as I can imagine. He focused on writing about the small moments of our lives, the beautiful words of his young children, the pain and pleasures of family, the trials of faith and spirit in a world unfriendly to the notion of either. [image error]His writing was sui generis, focused on daily life, the human, the pleasures of grace and kindness. Here he is at the ocean as a young boy, the first intimations of adulthood coming to him:

We were perhaps eight and ten, my brother and I, both invited to a house by the ocean, and that first night, after lots of hullabaloo, we were ladled into old summer camp cots that hadn’t been used since Lincoln’s time, and I remember, as if it was just last week, that we both felt something grim in the sea for the first time—a cold careless mastery. I still can’t articulate this very well. We lay there listening to the infinitesimally tiny increase in wavelet volume as the tide came in, rustling acres of mussel shells and old boats and horseshoe crabs and the pots that jailed uncountable families of lobsters, and the scents sliding through the windows were loud, dense, lurid, something to smell gingerly and back away from. I was scared more than I would ever admit to my brother.

What smaller moment could you choose to write about than the night-fear of a young child and yet how large a lesson Doyle teaches us of humanity, of shared experience.

I suppose my point is that Brian Doyle is the essence of a local writer—I’ve never met anyone on the East Coast who knows of his work, despite his having written six novels, two books of stories, six poetry collections, and fourteen books of essays. He was editor of Portland Magazine, the award-winning University of Portland publication, for more than twenty-five years. But he lived and worked in a small community of love and respect, and by his own words, that was enough for him.

The awards, the publications, the recognition are all very satisfying in the moment, but the honor that endures, I believe, is how you are remembered. And so, in this moment, right now, cherish your accomplishments, but cherish more your friends, your family, the people who make you whole. You need nothing more.

A View to a Kilt

[image error]Kaitlyn Dunnett here, reminding everyone that the thirteenth Liss MacCrimmon Mystery, A View to a Kilt, was released as a hardcover and in e-book format yesterday. I’ve been plugging this book for a while now, so I apologize if you’re sick of hearing about it, but if, on the other hand, you can’t wait to get your hands on a copy, here’s a handy link provided by my publisher that will take you, on the sidebar, to all the major bookselling outlets. You can also buy it from your local independent bookseller or ask your local library to buy a copy.

https://www.kensingtonbooks.com/book.aspx/39170

In this one, Liss and her husband, Dan Ruskin, find a murder victim in their own back yard. Literally. And he turns out to be Liss’s long lost uncle, Charlie MacCrimmon. Why did he come back to Moosetookalook? That’s the burning question Liss has to answer.

[image error]

This storyline gave me the opportunity to continue to work on the relationship between Liss and her . . . forceful mother, Violet. Vi is loosely based on my own mother, so I had a lot of personality traits to work with! At the same time, many of the characters who’ve appeared in previous books have a role in this one, especially the village librarian, Dolores, and her husband Moose, chief of police Sherri Campbell, and Sherri’s mother-in-law, Thea, who just happens to be the head of the local board of selectmen . . . and also an old flame of Charlie MacCrimmon’s.

Yes, it’s another one of my convoluted plots—the best kind, from my point of view. And of course, cats and Scottie dogs have a role to play, too.

I’ll be guest blogger over at The Wickeds on Friday. Also check out http://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/2020/01/a-tribute-to-lumpkin-cat-guest-post-by.html for my post at Mystery Fanfare from Monday. In it I explain the absence of Lumpkin the cat from this entry in the series. My last two posts here also relate to A View to a Kilt and you can find them under “Kaitlyn’s Posts” in the sidebar.

And now, a reward for the faithful readers who have read this far in today’s post. I have a hardcover copy of A View to a Kilt to give away. The winner will be chosen from among those who leave a comment here (here, not on Facebook or elsewhere) between now and midnight on January 31. Sorry, but I do have to limit eligibility to those living in the U.S., although of course I’d love to hear from those of you who live elsewhere. Anyone in the U. S. who has ever tried to mail a book out of the country will understand why.

[image error]

With the January 2020 publication of A View to a Kilt, Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett will have had sixty-one books traditionally published. 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 Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries and the “Deadly Edits” series as Kaitlyn. As Kathy, her most recent book is a collection of short stories, Different Times, Different Crimes but there is a new, standalone historical mystery in the pipeline. She maintains three websites, at www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com and another, comprised of over 2000 mini-biographies of sixteenth-century English women, at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women.

Back to the Land in Maine

Today we have a special treat, a post from special guest Elizabeth Penney, who has a new Maine-set mystery in stores now. Welcome, Liz.

[image error]

Thank you to Maine Crime Writers for including me as a guest! Although I now live in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, my new cozy mystery series is set in fictional Blueberry Cove, Maine. I also grew up in Maine, after moving to Readfield at age seven.

As might be expected, the Apron Shop Series includes well-known aspects of life in Maine: lobster, lighthouses, and a charming coastal village. But those of us who have lived in the state know that Maine is so much more than a tourist destination. It’s a place of many stark contrasts, with an often quirky history and reputation for eccentricity. Maine’s remoteness and sparse settlement has long been a lure to those who want to forge their own paths.

[image error]

Hems and Homicide, book one in the series, includes two murders. One is a cold case, a young woman who disappeared in the 1970s. Iris Buckley, my sleuth, tracks the young woman’s footsteps to a former commune in Liberty, Maine. My family still lives near Liberty, and when I learned there used to be several communes in the area, I invented one for my story.

In the 1970s, Maine experienced an influx of new residents seeking to “get back to the land,” a movement inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing’s book, The Good Life. They dreamed of self-sufficiency, growing their own food and heating with wood while rejecting the so-called “rat race.” Many settled on old farms, abandoned when agricultural production boomed in the Midwest. Farming was never easy in Maine, with its short growing season and rocky soil.

In my younger days, I spent quite a bit of time with homesteaders, as they were also called. My friends built their own houses (mostly with hand tools) and lived without electricity or running water. One of them built a big dome, which looked cool but always had problems with leaks. They planted gardens—some illicit—and raised chickens and livestock. One homesteader even used a horse to cut hay and skid logs out of the woods.

I loved visiting those hand-hewn homes. Nothing is more peaceful than the absence of electrical hum or warmer than wood heat, which seems to penetrate the bones. The lifestyle itself forces a slower pace, a savoring of everyday tasks. Like washing dishes, for example, which requires heating water on the stove first. There’s something about this simplicity that beckons, as if life is stripped to the beautiful and essential.

[image error]

Photo by Victor Biagiotti

Now, decades later, Maine is seeing a second wave of small-scale farming, with Downeast Magazine calling the trend, Back to the Land 2.0. The demand for fresh and local food has created opportunities for farmers and entrepreneurs in Maine and elsewhere. Unfortunately, new laws—like the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act—often burden small producers. But in a characteristic move, Maine has struck a blow for independence. Over forty towns have now adopted food sovereignty ordinances, which means residents don’t need state licenses or inspections to sell their products from home or farm. Communities have the power to create local rules regulating locally produced food.

I love Maine. And writing about Maine too.

To learn more about Maine’s original back to the land movement, I recommend The Good Life, a Bangor Daily News feature. http://external.bangordailynews.com/projects/2014/04/goodlife/index.html

[image error]

Elizabeth Penney lives in New Hampshire’s frozen north where she pens mysteries and tries to grow things. She’s the author of the Apron Shop Series, with book one, Hems and Homicide, available now, as well as numerous titles for Annie’s Fiction and Guideposts.

Buy link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07SBQ9Y2Z/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

 

A Full House of YA Excellence

John Clark sharing five young adult books that are all stellar in different ways. Three are in a series with the final book coming out late last week, just in time for me to write this post. Another describes hardscrabble rural Maine from the perspective of a teen protagonist much like Gerry Boyle has done for mystery fiction and I consider him the absolute best at doing so. The last one is by Katie McGarry, one of the best YA authors around. Since discovering her when I was the Hartland librarian, I’ve pre-ordered and loved every one of her books. What follows are my impressions of these great reads. If you, or someone you know likes young adult fiction, you’re in for a treat or maybe more with these.

[image error]

When I reviewed Betty Cully’s Three Things I Know Are True on Goodreads, I described it thusly:

“It’s very clear that Betty Culley has experienced some of the emotional landscape in this book, either personally or professionally. She also captures hardscrabble Maine, the part I’m very familiar with, as well as Gerry Boyle. Written in verse form, this takes readers through a bleak physical and emotional landscape, part of rural Maine where hope left when the local mill closed, sadly a reality in more and more towns. What transpires as you follow the events after Jonah accidentally shoots himself in the head, is first a fracturing between neighbors, so well described as Liv and Clay’s mom meet on the yellow line dividing the dead end street where they live like it was a demilitarized zone. Then you follow Jonah’s care, with the personalities of the nurses caring for him playing their own roles, Liv’s feelings about her brother, as well as Clay, the boy who was her brother’s best friend and who she cares deeply about, then the events leading up to the negligence trial, pitting Clay’s family against Liv’s. You get to see Liv’s inner monologue as she tries to connect with her brother in his new, nearly unresponsive form, deal with how unimportant school becomes and go through the trial and its aftermath. One scene that really illustrates the plight of those struggling when wages and benefits are inadequate, or nonexistent, comes when Liv deals with her mom’s tooth. Read the book to see what happened. This is an excellent look at struggle, grief, love and the real Maine “

[image error]

Katie McGarry’s Echoes Between Us features two torn teens from very different economic backgrounds, but who share hidden urges and secrets that pull them together. Veronica sees ghosts and suffers from blinding migraines courtesy of a brain tumor. Her mom died from a brain tumor and left her trucker husband as the only family Veronica has. She stands out for her daring, funky clothing and her close circle of friends, but is sneered at by most everyone else at her school. She’s adamant in her denial that she’s in danger of following her mom’s path in terms of the brain tumor

Sawyer can do no wrong, at least in the eyes of the popular crowd, but has been forced into a role he hates following his parents’ divorce. When he, his little sister and mom move into the apartment on the first floor of the home Veronica and her dad live in, it starts a chain of events that make for a very compelling read, one that includes ghosts, guilt, secrets, a diary that’s 100 years old and plenty of surprises. I won’t spoil anything by saying more, but this is Katy at her best.

[image error]

In Truly Devious, The Vanishing Stair, and The Hand On The Wall, Maureen Johnson takes Stevie, a girl obsessed with murder and crime from the Philadelphia home where she lives with her rigid and full of preconceptions/unreal expectation parents and has her accepted by Ellingham Academy, a most unusual private school in the Vermont wilderness. While it’s never mentioned, I got the impression that she’s on the high end of the autism spectrum.

[image error]

What unfolds in this trilogy is a blend of murder and kidnapping starting when the school opened in the 1930s that intertwine with three murders happening while Stevie and her classmates are at the academy. She’s surrounded by a most intriguing cast of fellow students, every one with quirks, talents and secrets, secret hiding places, tunnels and even political intrigue.

[image error]

I’m most impressed by Maureen’s seamless weaving of the events from the 1930s school period which includes a kidnapping gone wrong, the obsessions of both the adults and three students from that era, and what happens in the present day at the school. Doing so over three books without seeming repetitious really impressed me. One of the cover blurbs on book three compares the series to Harry Potter and in retrospect, I must agree. If you like atmospheric mysteries with some eerie elements, this series is for you. Best of all, with all three books available, there’s no waiting, so feel free to shut off the phone and binge.

Weekend Update: January 25-26, 2020

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will be a posts by John Clark (Monday), special guest Elizabeth Penney (Tuesday), Dick Cass (Thursday), and a group post, “Adventures in Research” (Friday).

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

[image error]

 

Kaitlyn Dunnett’s A View to a Kilt will be released on Tuesday in hardcover and e-book editions. She’ll be posting more about it here on Maine Crime Writers on Wednesday.

Fans of Lea Wait‘s books might want to check out the recent posts at http://cozymysterybookreviews.blogspot.com/ where reviews of just about all of Lea’s mysteries have been posted during the last few weeks. The review of her last book, Thread and Buried, includes comments by Kaitlyn Dunnett and others.

Kate Flora is excited to have a story in the upcoming anthology The Faking of the President, coming in April.

[image error]

And with apologies for so much “Kate-focused” news, here’s the link to William Bushnell’s review of A Child Shall Lead Them: https://www.centralmaine.com/?p=1705898

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. Contact Kate Flora

So, When Did You Start Writing?

Darcy Scott here. I get this question at least once at every signing/show I attend, along with its inevitable follow-up: “And how long did it take you to get published?” In my case, the answer to the first question is about 40 years ago, if you count a brief, spectacularly unsuccessful Middle School foray into short stories and a disastrous experience with the dreaded personal essay at around the same time. Publication? That one’s a bit more complicated.

About that essay. It was, I admit, a paltry effort completed in record time merely to satisfy what, to my way of thinking, was an arbitrary requirement imposed on us by Mr. Miles, my seventh grade English teacher. I honestly can’t remember the subject I chose; what I do remember is that my best friend’s essay about her Down syndrome brother won her an A—which, I admit, was well deserved. Said teacher would tell you I was a lazy writer, and he’d be right. The fact he thoroughly humiliated me by informing the entire class of this fact—a cruel but common critiquing practice back in the day—turned out to be good preparation for the reams of rejection slips that loomed large in my future.

My love affair with fiction took off later that same year, after the first of many readings of Shirley Jackson’s stunning The Haunting of Hill House—my enthusiasm for putting pen to paper galvanized by all that dark energy, Jackson’s spare and brilliant prose. I started with short stories, as many novelists do—my first attempt a romance of sorts begun on a train trip to Fort Lauderdale to visit my grandparents, and finished as I lounged on their living room floor. I was fourteen and wildly in love with Paul McCartney at the time (cue eye rolls and snorts of derision), and the resulting story—self-indulgent, poorly written and full of embarrassing teenage angst—meandered for a mind-numbing 30 pages or so. Ugh. 

[image error]The Author at Work on the Living Room Floor, Circa 1966

I took another brief stab at short stories in college after consuming Jhumpa Lahiri’s brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Interpreter of Maladies, and encouraged by a course I was taking at the time. No one was more surprised than I was when it won the school’s literary prize. It later became the first chapter of many, many, MANY drafts of my first psychological thriller, Margel’s Madness—a semi-autobiographical take on escaping a toxic family situation. This early and very minor success nonetheless left me in no doubt of my inadequacy in this particular narrative form. Short stories require a skill set I simply don’t have—namely the ability to distill my inevitable sprawl of ideas into a succinct 20 or 30 pages. I stand in in awe of writers who excel at it, writers like Ms. Lahiri.

[image error]

It was then I turned to the novel. Novels, I reasoned, were roomy, expansive. Plenty of space here; a woman could roll up her sleeves and dive right in, travel down any number of narrative byways and not run out of room. Two years later I completed my first novel, Hunter Huntress, though it would be years and years, and years again before it was eventually picked up by a small, quirky publishing house in Britain—a bumpy road that began with a very traditional hunt for an agent. As almost all authors have experienced and many non-authors have perhaps intuited by the deer-in-the-headlights look some of us assume when asked, this can be a grueling and humiliating process. Many agents I’ve encountered don’t bother responding to unsolicited queries; those that do are known to generate reams of form letters that may or may not be personalized. Usually not. One agent did send me a personalized response of a sort, addressing me by my protagonist’s name rather than my own, the letter itself covered with footprints. Everybody’s a critic. 

[image error]

Eventually I signed with an agent in Manhattan (Manhattan!!) who was very enthusiastic about the manuscript and sent it off to several top New York houses. When no one bit, we doubled down. Ten more submissions, ten more rejections. Twenty, thirty—which in the annals of publishing, is a mere drop in the bucket. I reassured myself with stories I’d heard of far longer waits than mine. Robert Persig’s classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was rejected by 121 houses prior to its eventual publication. Karl Marlantes’s debut novel, Matterhorn, was stuck in literary purgatory for more than thirty years before he found a publisher willing to take it on. He simply refused to give up. By comparison, Hunter Huntress was turned down by a paltry 35 publishers before my British publisher picked it up. 

[image error]

Happy ending, right? I wish. Upon publication, the head of this erstwhile concern suffered a nervous breakdown (the dual victim of financial fraud and a romantic con), and hid from all the world, including her clueless roster of increasingly agitated authors, for a good six months. This is not a joke.

By this time, though, I was well into writing Matinicus, the first of my Maine Island Mysteries, and hardly blinked when that Manhattan agent informed me she was burned out and leaving the business for a job as the manager of a Playboy Club. This is also not a joke. 

But, as they say, that was then and this is now. Today I’m happily ensconced with a small regional publisher specializing in books about Maine written by Maine authors—a close-knit, passionate group that spends its days joyfully ushering books into print. Lucky me. 

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.

Messages from the Universe

Kate Flora: I am now starting day six of an awfully spartan diet, which likely colors my mood in a not very pleasant fashion. Still, when I sit down to blog, thinking of readers and writers out there, I always cheer up. I don’t really know who reads this. We’re all so busy that being a faithful blog follower is difficult. I will assume, though, that someone will read this, and perhaps, like me, be one of those who find the winter months are great for reflection.

From time to time, usually in anticipation of what my husband and I call “significant” [image error]birthdays, I will wake up one morning with an interesting question in mind. For fifty, it was “What matters?” For sixty, “What are you waiting for?” For sixty-five, the question was “What will you regret?” Now, having passed another significant birthday, the message is, “It’s okay to slow down.”

I have found these “messages from the universe” to be very helpful. Asking what matters really made me reflect on things that are most important to me. It made me ask what do I love? I love Maine. I love being in our little cottage and smelling the sea air and watching the birds and boats and sunsets. I love writing, watching those stories emerge from my imagination, sometimes coming so fast that I can hardly type fast enough to get them down, other times when they stubbornly refuse to get told. Testing me and making me work for every character and scene. I love it when I am so deeply into a book that I don’t want to do anything else. I love that dozy time before I wake when the story is already playing in my head and I can hear my characters talk. What matters? Family and friends.  Feeding people. My gardens.

[image error]The message from sixty was compelling: what was I waiting for? I’ve always been a bit timid, kind of a loner. A worker bee who rarely gives herself permission to leave the desk, the project, the characters, and just go out and play. I still haven’t become a motorcycle outlaw or run away for a six months to a year just to do obsessive writing (despite being so jealous of John McPhee), but I have traveled to places I always dreamed of, like Egypt and India and Patagonia. I have tried to say “yes” more often, instead of staying at my desk. I’ve twice gone to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for two week writing residencies. I’ve stopped being so cautious about saving all my money for the future and let myself enjoy little treats. I’ve indulged in my Goodwill and Salvation Army treasure hunts. Trivial as it is, I’ve let the little farm girl who only had one pair of shoes buy all the second-hand shoes she wants. My closet is groaning.

[image error]“What will you regret” is another nudge to live instead of postponing life. I’m slow to put it into practice–I still haven’t climbed Katahdin or made it to The Common Ground Fair, but hope to do that this summer. I have started to plant vegetables in pots. I’m taking tap dancing lessons, despite being an utter klutz. I’m saying yes to more chances to spend time with friends. I’m enjoying the adventure of trying a new character and learning his story. I’ve marked my calendar so I’ll remember to enter the lottery for The Lost Kitchen. I saw fields abloom with poppies in California. I finally went out to see the puffins!

 

I haven’t lived with “It’s okay to slow down” for very long, but I have a kind of a [image error]pushme/pullyou reaction so far. Turns out, I have absolutely no idea how to slow down. Not with a book to be rewritten, another awaiting beta comments, and one due in June. Maybe, as in that movie “What About Bob?” I’ll have to work on this one with baby steps. Baby steps like stopping in the window to watch birds at the feeder or how blue shadows illuminate animal tracks in the snow. How the oilman’s hose leaves snake tracks across the yard. How if I stay very still, I can listen to the little creaks of my house. I can even put my delicious oils in my diffuser, close my eyes, and inhale.

Friends, do you get messages from the universe? Do you listen? What are your messages?