Lea Wait's Blog, page 152

Books by Lea Wait (and a winner)

The winner of the drawing for an advance reading copy of THREAD AND BURIED is Rosemary Leveille. Congrats, Rosemary, and welcome to Maine!

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For any of our readers who aren’t familiar with all of Lea’s work, here’s an up-to-date list of all her titles. Enjoy!

  Books by Lea Wait

For children:

Stopping to Home, ISBN 0689838492, Aladdin

Seaward Born, ISBN 068984719X, McElderry or 0689848609, Aladdin

Wintering Well, ISBN 0689856474, Aladdin

Finest Kind, ISBN 1416909524, McElderry

Uncertain Glory, ISBN 978-1-939017-25-3, Islandport Press

For Freedom Alone, ISBN 978-0-9964084-8-6, Sheepscot River Press

Contrary Winds, ISBN 978-0-9964084-9-3, Sheepscot River Press

For Adults and Young Adults

Pizza to Die For, ISBN 9780996408455, Sheepscot River Press

For adults:

Historical Fiction

Justice and Mercy, ISBN 978-1798971246, Sheepscott River Press

Maine Murder Mystery Series (written as Cornelia Kidd)

Death and a Pot of Chowder, ISBN 978-1683315834, Crooked Lane Books

Shadows Antique Print Mystery Series

Shadows at the Fair, ISBN 0743456203, Pocket Books

Shadows on the Coast of Maine, ISBN 1416587713, Pocket Books

Shadows on the Ivy, ISBN 0743475585, Pocket Books

Shadows at the Spring Show, ISBN 0743475593, Pocket Books

Shadows of a Down East Summer, ISBN 978-1564744975, Perseverance Press

Shadows on a Cape Cod Wedding , ISBN 978-1564745316, Perseverance Press

Shadows on a Maine Christmas, ISBN 978-1-56474-547-7, Perseverance Press

Shadows on a Morning in Maine, ISBN 978-1-56474-577-4, Perseverance Press

Mainely Needlepoint Mystery Series

Twisted Threads, ISBN 978-1-61773-004-7, Kensington Publishing

Threads of Evidence, ISBN 978-1617730061, Kensington Publishing

Thread and Gone, ISBN 978-1617730085, Kensington Publishing

Dangling By a Thread, ISBN 978-1-4967-0626-3, Kensington Publishing

Tightening the Threads ISBN 1-4967-0628-5, Kensington Publishing

Thread the Halls, ISBN: 978-1-4967-0639-0, Kensington Publishing

Thread Herrings, ISBN: 978-1-4967-1673-0, Kensington Publishing

Thread on Arrival, ISBN: 978-1496716736, Kensington Publishing

Thread and Buried, ISBN: 978-1496716750, Kensington Publishing (release date: November 26, 2019)

And here’s the buy link for THREAD AND BURIED: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com/book.aspx/39279 (this has links for all retailers)

Nonfiction:

Living and Writing on the Coast of Maine, ISBN 978-0996408424, Sheepscot River Press

 

 

Using Colorful Language – No, Not That Kind

Kate Flora: I’ve just wrapped up the first draft of Gutted,a book where fog plays a big [image error]role, a book set in October when the season is definitely changing, and where much of the action takes place at night. As I’ve been writing, I’ve been constantly looking for ways to “illuminate” the scenes, to make my readers see and hear and feel what is going on with my characters. What does it feel like to step from a warm bar into a very foggy October night? What does it smell like to enter a very bloody murder scene? How can I make someone feel the dirt and poverty of the house where a witness lives? What are the attributes of Detective O’Leary’s favorite bar and who hangs out there?

If I’ve done my job, you’ll see and feel that clammy fog, hear the hesitation in a witness’s voice and the regret in another. You’ll hear the gritty rush of sudden footsteps in the dark and fall in love with brave nine-year-old Nola, who is more mature than her mother.

[image error]Now that I’ve put that book away to “rest” so I can edit it with fresh eyes, I have to clear foggy Ocober from my head and return to Death Comes Knocking, the tenth book in my Thea Kozak series. When I pick up the thread of the story, which I’ve abandoned for months, it is high summer in Maine and Thea is settling into her antique Maine farmhouse—not quite finished—and growing her first vegetable garden. I have to call up summer colors, summer weather, summer scents, and summer gardens.

Writing is a process of discovery for the writer as well as the reader, and I am seeing Thea choose the color of the baby’s room and choose the perfect chair, feeling her conflict as a mama deer shows her baby Thea’s lettuce patch. I am watching her penetrate subterfuge as people try to lie to her and seeing the language she uses to herself as she visits a client school with her computer expert in tow, a tiny Asian-African American woman who gets mistaken for a child. I’ve been writing Thea Kozak mysteries for more than a quarter of a century, and in book ten, I am constantly challenged to blend what I already know about my character with new discoveries and insights. Also challenged to meld Thea’s distinctive voice with new circumstances and characters.

It has been more than thirty-five years since I’ve been pregnant, and things have changed, so to depict some of the challenges a tall, eight-month pregnant woman faces in an airplane bathroom, I have to turn to readers who supply their expertise and help me put my poor character there. Also challenging is to dress her, now that, as she puts it, she looks like she’s swallowed a basketball and putting shoes on invisible feet is a chore.

[image error]John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, says that what writers do is to put their dreams in the reader’s head. We imagine it for you and if we do the job well, you will see it. You may not see it the way we do when we write it, but we always hope that you’ll see the places, feel the chill and the premonitions, and want whack those liars upside the head just as we did when we wrote it. And we hope, as we write through the seasons, that we don’t make awful mistakes, as I almost did in Chosen for Death, my first Thea Kozak mystery, where, writing in the spring a book set in fall, I had blooming azaleas outside a Massachusetts condo in October. A careful reader would see that for sure.

 

 

How Shadow Picks a Winner

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, with a follow up on last Friday’s review of Lea Wait’s Mainely Needlepoint mystery, Thread and Buried, and a reminder that to be entered in the drawing for an advance reading copy you need to leave a comment at that post, the weekend update, or today’s blog. The deadline is midnight tomorrow (Tuesday, November 5) and the results of the “drawing” will be posted on Wednesday. I’ll also notify the winner by email.

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That brings me to the means by which I choose winners in all my giveaways. It’s one I developed back when we still had three elderly cats living with us. Now that they’re gone, we just have Shadow. Last month, she picked the winner of an ARC of my A View to a Kilt, so she already knows the routine. As regular readers of this blog know, my husband and I inherited Shadow from Lea, so it seems doubly appropriate that she do the honors for Thread and Buried.

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Here’s how it works. I assign a number to each comment. Then I crumple up post-it notes with numbers written on them, as many or as few as necessary, depending on how many people leave comments. In a variation on drawing a number out of a hat, I toss the post-its in a container, give it a shake, and then dump them all out on the floor. This is where the cat comes in. Anything lying on the floor is guaranteed to attract feline attention. The first post-it Shadow bats at or picks up with her teeth will be the winner.

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Good luck everyone, and thank you for taking the time to leave a comment.

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[photos of Shadow are from a practice run]

Weekend Update: November 2-3, 2019

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will be posts by Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Monday), Kate Flora (Tuesday), John Clark (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:

[image error]Lea Wait wrote one last book in the Mainely Needlepoint series and it will be published at the end of November. We’ll be featuring posts about Thread and Buried throughout the month. See the review posted yesterday for details on a drawing to give away an advance reading copy provided by her publisher, Kensington Books.

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In case you missed this earlier, here are the winners in our “Where Would You Put The Body” contest.

The “Where Would You Put the Body?” contest has winners! We have prizes for First, Second, and Third place—books of course and other Maine goodies. It was great fun to see where entrants wanted to park Evil Aunt Alice (or whomever.) Here are the three winning entries along with the folks who submitted them. We’ll contact each to arrange prize delivery.

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1st place Katherine Page. Gut the engine, keep the flowers going and in most rural areas you’d never have anyone give it a second thought until you died and some poor relative had to deal with the junker.

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2nd place Janet Murch. Think about it. If you hid a body in one of these tanks right after everything has been spread and add quick lime, by the time it gets used again, there won’t be much left to discover.

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3rd Place Bruce Harris Room 9, York Harbor Inn, York, ME. Gotta love hiding a corpse in a room that everyone forgot.

 

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

A Review of Lea Wait’s THREAD AND BURIED (and a giveaway)

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. Our dear friend and fellow blogger, Lea Wait, wrote one last Mainely Needlepoint mystery before her death in August. Thread and Buried will be in stores November 26. Thanks to her publisher, Kensington Books, we have an Advance Reading Copy to give away to one lucky person who comments on this post between now and midnight on Tuesday, November fifth. Lea’s cat, Shadow, who now lives with me, will pick the winner.

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Thread and Buried is the ninth Mainely Needlepoint Mystery, a series that started with Twisted Threads, in which Angie Curtis returns to Haven Harbor, Maine after ten years away. During those years, Angie worked as a private detective. Through the first eight books, she establishes a good relationship with the local police and the state police detective who handles homicides in her part of Maine. That comes in handy in this new mystery when a “suspicious death” occurs on the set of a movie scheduled to be shot in her small mid-coast community. Angie has useful contacts. Not only is she helping furnish the sets for the movie, an offshoot of her new career running Mainely Needlepoint, a business she’s taken over from her grandmother, but she’s romantically involved with Patrick West. His mother, a famous Hollywood actress, is the star of the movie and many of the key players are staying at her waterfront mansion for the duration of the shoot.

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Kathy/Kaitlyn and Lea at Malice Domestic in 2016

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but suffice it to say that a death involving high profile people has the investigating officers anxious to cross every T and dot every I. That makes life miserable for all those connected to the production. Some are strangers to Angie, but others are people she cares about—characters who played key roles in previous entries in the series. Both Leo, who was at the center of the action in the eighth mystery, Thread on Arrival, and Ruth, one of the Haven Harbor residents who has been a regular in the series from the beginning, come under suspicion.

I will confess, knowing what Lea herself was going through while she was writing this book, I was a little concerned that it might not be as good as previous books in the series. I worried for nothing. True professional that she was, with a clever, inventive mind and incredible determination, she left us with yet another excellent mystery. There are plenty of twists and turns and a satisfying conclusion, plus a couple of tasty recipes added on at the end.

 

To win an ARC of Thread and Buried, leave your comment below. If you came to this blog from Facebook or some other platform, please be aware that leaving a comment there will not be enough to enter you in the drawing. Only people posting comments directly to MaineCrimeWriters.com are eligible. Best of luck, everyone. It’s a terrific read.

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With the June 2019 publication of Clause & Effect, Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty 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. Her websites are www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com and she maintains a website about women who lived in England between 1485 and 1603 at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women.

 

For Halloween: Our Votes for Scariest Movie

In honor of Halloween, the Maine Crime Writers offer two group posts to talk about our favorite scary movies and our favorite scary  books. We hope you’ll leave a comment to share some of the titles that have sent you running for cover, or hiding under them.

[image error]Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: Discounting The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958)—I was looking over my shoulder for the cyclops for weeks after seeing that one, but it isn’t generally regarded as a horror film—my vote goes to 1963’s black and white classic, The Haunting, starring Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn, not to be confused with the remake with Catherine Zita-Jones taking the role Claire Bloom played. That one certainly had more blood and gore, but wasn’t anywhere near as frightening. What makes the original, based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, so scary is what we don’t see. It’s what we imagine that terrifies us. The moment that gives me chills just thinking about it? Claire Bloom and Julie Harris are in together in a pitch-black room and Julie Harris says, “If you’re over there, who’s holding my hand?”

[image error]Susan Vaughan: I remember well the above movie, and that same movie line chilled me just as it did Kaitlyn/Kathy. I’d read the book and had felt the same shock when I read that line, but hearing it in Julie Harris’s trembling voice was equally terrifying. My scariest and favorite scary film is apparently a favorite of many because it’s the seventh highest grossing (not gross) film in North America. Of course, it’s Jaws, starting Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, and Murray Hamilton. We all remember the classic line, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” The iconic theme music evokes dread every time it’s played, even in jest. The giant shark itself was a mechanical device that was pieced together and nearly fell apart during filming. But it did its job making everyone in theaters jump and shriek when it rose out of the water.

Kate Flora: I was a timid ten years old, and the nearest movie theater was sixteen miles[image error] away in Rockland, when, as I remember it, Brother John hatched the idea of going to the Strand and seeing The House on Haunted Hill, the 1959 version. Somehow, he convinced us that Vincent Price was a comic actor and the movie would be funny. We had no money, and had to search old purses, pockets, and even vacuum the registers to find enough to pay for tickets. And then, as five strangers are locked in a haunted house with an acid vat in the cellar, offered $10,000 if they can survive the night, I sat in my chair and was scared to death. There were locked rooms, and skeletons, and a mysterious hanging and disappearances. I was so scared that I don’t think I’ve seen a scary movie since.

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Jen Blood: When The Blair Witch Project came out, I drove to Portland to see it with a friend, then returned home to the cabin in the woods where I was housesitting. Alone. That night, I woke to a noise outside the cabin in the middle of the night, then tried to turn on the lights…except the power was out. Heart pounding, I grabbed my dog Moonshadow and hightailed it to my pickup truck. I put my contacts in while locked in the cab of the truck, then drove promptly to my mom’s house in the next town. It was about midnight by then, and there was a blackout in the area – I remember driving along completely darkened streets to my completely darkened childhood home and, while mostly aware that I was being ridiculous, also being about sixty-percent certain that the Blair witch had wiped out my entire neighborhood. Thankfully, my mom was awake reading by candlelight when I got there, though she was understandably a little freaked out when I showed up. She did, however, let Moonshadow and me sleep with her that night.

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For Halloween: Our Votes for Scariest Book

In honor of Halloween, the Maine Crime Writers offer two group posts to talk about our favorite scary movies and our favorite scary  books. We hope you’ll leave a comment to share some of the titles that have sent you running for cover, or hiding under them.

[image error]Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: I don’t often read horror fiction, although I do have a secret affection for vampire romance novels, but there have been a few exceptions, most of them written by Maine’s own Stephen King. My vote for scariest goes to Pet Sematary, a book that King has said scares even him. Any pet owner will understand why, as will any parent who has ever contemplated the possibility of losing a child. As an aside, there’s an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (another of my guilty pleasures), that deals with a similar theme but with a much less creepy ending.

And a P.S.: In the non-horror genre, the scariest novel I’ve ever read is Clive Cussler’s Dragon. Anyone who is dependent upon a computer to make a living will understand why.

Susan Vaughan: My vote for scariest book is William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist. I’m not [image error]sure the author meant it as a horror book, but it raised goosebumps all over me. The film version comes in a close second, but had less shock value because I’d read the book. I haven’t read horror books in a long time, but Kaitlyn/Kathy’s choice of Pet Sematary was pretty frightening, as were all the others of his horror books I’ve read. One particular short story, “The Mist,” about creatures within a mist snatching and killing people, still makes me shudder when I think about it.

Maureen Milliken: Assuming our “votes” are for what scared us the most, and not an election for what we think everyone should be scared by, the book that first scared the living daylights out of me was The Mystery of the Crimson Ghost by Phyllis A. Whitney. I [image error]believe I was 9 or 10 when I read it, and it involved the ghost of a dog that glowed red and made ungodly wailing noises. I think if it’d been a person, I wouldn’t have been nearly as scared. I have a memory of a few years later my brother, a year younger reading it out loud to some younger siblings and me saying, “Don’t read them that! It’s too scary!” They looked at me like I was nuts and kept right on.

A few years later, as a teenager, I was reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote on a Saturday at home when the rest of my large family wasn’t around. I was alone in a large house that didn’t really lock and our dog (hmm, theme) kept barking for no reason. Even though it was during the day, I was terrified. Probably one of the few times growing up I was happy when someone came home and I was no longer alone in the house. It comes in second. I don’t scare easily as far as books and movies go — in fact when someone tells me they don’t read mysteries “because they’re too scary,” I have a tough time getting what they mean. But when an author hits the right notes, yikes!

Charlene D’Avanzo’s vote for scariest book goes to The Hot Zone by Richard Preston . . . and it isn’t fiction.

Darcy Scott picks Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

Kate Flora: Though his other novels are scary–after all, Hannibal Lecter is a terrifying [image error]character, as is the killer, in The Silence of the Lambs, it is Thomas Harris’s earlier book, Red Dragon, that is my scariest book of all time. The plot wouldn’t work as well today, in the era of digital photos, but the idea of someone randomly picking families to kill from photos they sent to be developed was terrifying. I think we’re all most frightened by murders that don’t have any connection or explanation. They’re just someone fundamentally evil stalking and killing. I don’t have to tell you that Harris is a mesmerizing writer, do I?

 

 

Vaughn Hardacker: Stephen King’s Cujo primarily because of all his books it’s the one that could happen.

Sandra Neily; The most fear I ever felt was worrying about Wilber the Pig in Charlotte’s Web. Worrying about the axe finding the baby pig. These first few lines were the scariest I’ve ever read. “Where’s Paper going with the axe?” asked Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”

(Seriously, avoided traditional horror books and most of Stephen King my whole life.) [image error][image error]

Thank goodness for the amazing spider!

 

 

 

 

John Clark: In college one of my fellow students supposedly read a book that landed her in the Arizona State Hospital. That left such a strong impression that I have avoided reading it to this day.

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Jen Blood: The only truly scary book I ever read was Stephen King’s Christine – which scared the holy bejeezus out of me. I was in my late teens at the time, and our family car was a 1972 Plymouth Satellite. If you’ve ever seen one, it is a monster of a vehicle. For weeks after reading the book, I couldn’t look at the Satellite without being certain it would come to life and run me down. After that, I made a point of avoiding any books that had a clear horror theme, though for a while I did make a living editing zombie-themed erotica… That tended to be more disturbing than overtly scary, though. But that’s a story for another time.

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Of Berries, Babies, and Book Events—A Season of Bounty Revisited

Darcy Scott again with my monthly Maine Crime Writers post. It’s late October as I pen this and we’re in the process of preparing Skater, our sailboat and warm weather home, for its annual haul out in Kittery. Stripping sails; draining water tanks; off-loading domestics; decommissioning the water maker, refrigeration, and other systems makes for a bittersweet, days-long work party that inevitably takes me back to the highlights of a season bursting with warm weather bounty. This year especially so. Bear with me while I revisit a few highpoints…

Sailing the Maine coast for most of the summer as we do—a combination of research for the next in my Island Mystery Series and the serious contemplation of those proverbial belly buttons to aid in said research—we’ve developed a couple indispensible  traditions—one of which is the late August gathering of wild, lowbush blueberries necessary in the production of the renowned “Skater Blueberry Boatcake” (recipe follows). Slap a piece down with some bacon and eggs, pour a second cup of coffee, and man…

[image error]Cleaning berries, post-harvest

Our hands-down favorite place to harvest Vaccinium angustifolium is just off Eggemoggin Reach—an enormous blueberry barren located directly opposite the town offices in Brooksville Center. Because we travel by boat, getting to this magical place requires dropping the anchor in sleepy Bucks Harbor and making the three-mile trek west-northwest from the historic, hundred-year-old Bucks Harbor Yacht Club (https://bucksharboryc.org)—pausing as we as hoof the crumbling macadam for a restorative Harbor Bar at the Bucks Harbor Market—this being that locally renowned marriage of graham cracker and vanilla ice cream enrobed in a thick, luxurious coating of dark chocolate. It’s hopeless to resist, so we don’t even try. Thus restored, we continue our quest. And lest you think we pilfer what might otherwise be marketable fruit when we finally climb that last hill to the barren, rest assured we’re careful to pick along the very edge of the road so as not to encroach. No one seems to mind, in any case, based on the number of island waves we receive each season (hands gripping wheel, fingers flipped up). 

The end of the summer season also heralds another kind of bounty—a long string of fall book events, literary festivals and other opportunities to meet readers and network with fellow authors, including this month’s “Murder by the Book” festival which was held at the Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor. Helluva time. 

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Stay with me now, ‘cause I’ve saved the best for last. This year, our annual fall harvest included one of a most personal kind: the birth of our fifth grandkid—a boy with the impressive handle of Felix “Hawk” Rivera Horton—who made a dramatic entrance via c-section on September 17, weighing in at seven pounds, five ounces. The name “Hawk” had everyone scratching their heads until it was explained that during her pregnancy, our daughter-in-law kept noticing a particular hawk perched in various trees quite close to the house and even, as her time approached, alighting boldly on the front deck to stare in the window. She had the sense it was keeping watch over her. No matter how you feel about such things, you have to admit it makes for a great story. And a great moniker.

I figure it’ll be a year or more before we can get that kiddo on the boat and put those kissable little hands to work picking berries. Introduce him to Harbor Bars, maybe, take him along to a signing or two. Oh, the possibilities!

[image error]Skater Blueberry Boatcake

Skater Blueberry Boatcake 
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Ingredients:  1 cup flour ¾ cup sugar 1 teaspoon baking powder ½ teaspoon salt ¼ cup softened butter/margarine 1 egg ½ cup milk 1 cup fresh Maine blueberries (frozen if you absolutely must) Topping: ½ cup sugar mixed with 1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Directions: Mix flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Cut in the butter/margarine and mix well. Add the egg and milk and beat till smooth. Pour into a greased 9 X 9 pan. Cover with the berries and top the whole thing with the sugar/cinnamon mixture. Bake for 35 – 40 minutes.

Walter Mosley on Writing Fiction

Last week Walter Mosley’s “Elements of Fiction” appeared on
my library’s new book display. Delighted, I nabbed it.

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Mosley is best known for his hard-boiled Easy Rollins
series that features a black Los Angeles PI. Maine
crime writers will remember Mosley’s presentations at last year’s New England
CrimeBake meeting. He was everything a speaker should be—funny, smart, informative,
memorable.

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In “Elements of Fiction” Mosley explains no less than
what fiction writing is and how to write a novel.

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In the preface, Mosley first tells us what his new book
isn’t. “I do not believe there is a roadmap to Successville in fiction
writing,” Next he draws the big picture. “Fiction is one of the few
constructive human activities in which we have to potential to make something
from nothing…  you take a small section
of the larger world … and then crush the subject down to only those elements
salient to the story … .”

[Further] “you add as little of the commonplace as
possible to make a story that seems large and real and pedestrian and,
hopefully, revealing. That’s what our experience of the world is. Good novels
are the same.”

Reading this, I was hooked. 

More Mosley: “There are places and states of mind the
novelist can discover that have never been seen, heard of, or imagined … The
potential of novels to reveal what was previously unimaginable is so vast that
I don’t believe any manual or reference books, road map, field guide or library
could exhaust the possibilities.”

“How does one, for instance, become a predictive genius
like Jules Verne? A writer who foretold the major scientific advances of the
following century, an explorer who didn’t leave his writing desk to see worlds
invisible, impossible to almost anyone else … 
How did these writers, and so many like them, pierce the veil of
convention and create works of such power and individuality that their books
might be thought to have lives of their own? … In this text I will present one
jigsaw piece that I have a tentative hold on.”

Readers of Maine Crime Writers, do I have your
attention?? Truly, you must read “Elements of Fiction” to hold Mosley’s jigsaw
piece in your hand. I will, though give you a hint.  Mosley’s first chapter is titled “The
Structure of Revelation”. Here he explains that writing can transcend itself if
we chose the right moment to reveal that story’s truth. That way, we might
create an epiphany for our readers.

Weekend Update: October 26-27, 2019

Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will be posts by Charlene D’Avanzo (Monday) and Darcy Scott (Tuesday). Thursday and Friday we’ll be doing group blogs on our picks for scariest movies and scariest books.

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