Lea Wait's Blog, page 154

If Music Be the Food of Love, Cook On

Yes, I know Shakespeare didn’t write it that way in Twelfth Night. But I’m definitely not the first to make the connection between food and love. In crime fiction as well as in romance fiction, people’s relationships are at the core of the story. Many mystery novels contain love stories, and even cozy mysteries employ the heroine sleuth’s bakery or restaurant or cupcake business as the set-up for the mystery. How many mysteries have begun with a family or friends or business dinner that ended in murder for one of the diners? So many family holiday traditions include preparing and sharing food, making sustenance more than a basic human need.

[image error]Even in a fast-paced romantic suspense or thriller, the characters have to eat sometime. Preparing food can bring the hero and heroine closer, creating a vital connection between them. Sharing food brings people together and can build a relationship, but it also provides the opportunity for conflict and/or insight into character in any kind of fiction. Sharing a meal can break down barriers. In my new release Hidden Obsession, Justin and Sheri cook a meal together. He cooks the mashed potatoes, and she the coq au vin.

This sharing both brings them together sensually and drives Sheri’s internal conflict about the secret in her past. Food feeds the mind and soul—and heart—with comfort, texture, flavor, and smell. Experiencing the cooking of a savory pot roast or an apple pie (my husband’s favorite) can associate that aroma in the man’s psyche as part of the woman who cooked it for him.

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Food scenes provide an opportunity to add sensory levels of smells and tastes. Applying the five senses in any story scene creates context, building reality for the reader. A woman preparing food for a man is the most primitive form of nurturing. Even more powerful emotionally is when the hero cooks for the heroine or feeds her by taking her to a restaurant or bringing her food. As a basic mating ritual, it’s part of providing for the mate, [image error]the male as provider, and not just with food. It demonstrates he pays attention to her needs and likes and will meet them. It’s a primordial yet binding aspect of the courting dance, especially when the hero feeds the heroine. A meal also provides a resting moment in the plot. In my book Never Surrender, while they’re hiding out from the bad guys, Rick prepares his Cuban family’s Arroz con Pollo, or rice with chicken, for Juliana. Preparing the meal provides that resting moment, gives them a chance to share their lives and is, yes, seductive, especially with a bottle of wine.

In Once Burned, Jake brings Lani a blueberry pie, which evokes shared childhood memories and pries open a chink in her distrust of him. Lani’s near orgasmic enjoyment of her slice leads to something more than pie.

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In my Cleopatra’s Necklace, as they’re fleeing the bad guys on a Greek island, Thomas buys cheese and bread for Cleo to eat in the car. She is touched by his concern and it warms her that he always seems to be feeding her.

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If anyone is interested in my recipes, you can download them at susanvaughan.com. Rick’s Arroz con Pollo is at the bottom of the Never Surrender page, and the coq au vin recipe is at the bottom of the Hidden Obsession page. My version of coq au vin is a bit simpler than the original, but delicious.. Sorry, you’re on your own for blueberry pie.

I’d love to have people share ideas about food in novels, or, hey, why not your real-life examples.

An Obituary for the JT

A sad story out of York County this week. The Journal Tribune will publish its last edition on October 12, putting an end to 135 years of local newsgathering in Biddeford, Saco and surrounding towns. [image error]

As soon as I heard the news, the chorus to Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi ran through my head, especially that insightful line about not missing something valuable until it’s gone.

Joni wrote that song to protest rampant overdevelopment, but her point is equally applicable to the loss of local journalism. The JT was the competition during my six-year stint as a reporter at the weekly York County Coast Star in Kennebunk. Its presses ran every day and ours only once a week, so my job required me to dig deeper into the stories their reporters (including our own Maureen Milliken) didn’t have time to dissect with a fine scalpel. I loved to scoop them, hated being scooped.

Despite the fact the JT reporters’ stories hit the streets every afternoon and mine were published only on Wednesdays, our job description was the same—to stick our noses into everything.

[image error]The bidding process for a lucrative snowplowing contract. The town councilor hushing up the fact her teenage son was driving the truck that carved donuts in the athletic field turf in the middle of the night. The suspicious-looking 55-gallon drums buried at the back corner of the landfill. Having multiple reporters on same beat meant damn few important stories slid between the cracks.

It surprised exactly none of my friends and relations that my Joe Gale series has newspaper reporters–Joe himself and his mentor Paulie Finnegan–as its heroes.  Not because I saw myself as heroic, but because of the indelible mark it left upon me to have worked in what I consider such an admirable profession.  I’m sure the same is true for my reporter-turned-crime-writer colleagues Maureen Milliken and Gerry Boyle, creators of Bernie O’Dea and Jack McMorrow, respectively. [image error]

To my knowledge none of us ever faced life-threatening situations covering crime and the courts, but we made sure we were visible in our communities so people would know who to call if they were mad about something, or thought an issue deserved a public airing. We listened to everyone’s opinions and tried to sort self-interest from public interest. We gave up our March Saturdays to attend annual town meetings and sat through twice-a-month planning board sessions that sometimes lasted until midnight. We were paid a pittance but that mattered less than our shared belief that local journalism was an essential force for good. [image error]

I will never stop believing that.

Every local newspaper that shuts its doors impoverishes the communities it covered. With the JT out of business, stories that should be illuminated will go uncovered. Things will happen that shouldn’t happen, and things that should will not, because an absolutely critical aspect of York County’s communications infrastructure has gone dark.

 

Like Joni says, we often don’t know what we have until it’s gone.

What’s a mystery novel?

            I recently
read two novels that set me to thinking about what makes a story a
mystery:  Richard Russo’s Chances Are . . . and Tana French’s The Witch Elm.  The authors are not strangers to me.  Maine’s own Russo is a special favorite.  I’ve read and–in varying  degrees enjoyed—all his books.  I’ve read with pleasure some but not all of
French’s Ireland-based detective novels and plan to go back to the earlier ones
I missed.  The two novels in question are
very different, but I had fun reading both of them.

        My rather odd decision to compare them as a
way of figuring out what makes a mystery a mystery resulted from my wife’s
question about whether she should read them. 
That’s a typical pattern for us. 
We have different tastes in fiction but always request and respect each
other’s recommendations.  I need to note
that my wife, though married to a would-be mystery writer, really can’t stand
and never reads mysteries, including my own. 
So it was a relatively easy call to not recommend French’s novel.  But at the same time I considered it a bit
more than a straight mystery and was tempted to suggest she try it.  I finally resisted the temptation.  The Russo novel presented more
difficulty.  She’s read most of Russo, though
without the consistent pleasure his works gave me. In this case, however, I did
recommend it, though with a warning that in a certain way it is, unlike any of
his others, a mystery.  Explaining that
to her is what got me to thinking about what makes a novel a mystery. (And,
BTW, she liked the characters and the non-mystery plots but would have been
happy not to have the mystery aspects. 
No surprise there.)

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            Chances Are . .. narrates the story of
three men who attended college together in the late 1960s.  What they had in common was, in part, their
unrequited love for a fellow student, a complicated and engaging woman. They
also shared the experience of being subject to the Vietnam draft lottery in
1969.  Two drew high numbers that in
effect shielded them from the draft, while the third drew a low number.  The story is set at a reunion weekend in
Martha’s Vineyard when they are in their mid-sixties.  The thematic core of the story is reflected
in the song of their youth that is also the book’s title:  Chances Are. 
Life is all about chances. The unrequited love plot enfolds a
mystery:  what happened to the woman,
Jacy? She apparently disappeared after spending a weekend with them on the
Vineyard back in 1970, the summer after their college graduation.  As in a classic mystery, there are hints of
murder, multiple plausible perpetrators, and even a grizzled now retired
policeman who thinks he knows where a body is buried.  But is Chances
Are . . . a “mystery” in the way readers of this blog might think of that
term?  Well, probably not, certainly not
one in the vein of a police procedural, though possibly a character-based cozy.

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            Tana French
has written classic police procedurals, but The
Witch Elm is very different.  It’s
got a bloody murder (actually two), multiple possible perps, related (maybe)
crimes, and cops galore.  But to me it
read more like a P.D. James psychological novel.  The central murder is eventually solved in
the sense that we learn who did it, but the real murderers go unpunished, while
the narrator, wholly innocent of that one, suffers daunting mental problems and
ultimately murders the detecting policeman—who richly deserves it!  This is not your father’s mystery novel, but
it’s a page-turning exploration of the many psychological ills induced by
crimes.

            One
possible conclusion is to say that Russo’s novel is a mystery disguised as a
social novel of manners and that French’s is a social novel of manners
disguised as a mystery.  Or maybe the
other way around?

            Reading
these two mysteries-that-may-not-be mysteries raised all sorts of questions for
me about what constitutes a true mystery. 
Maybe it doesn’t matter what genre label we place on a book.  Maybe all that matters is whether a story
engages the reader through intriguing characters, interesting themes, and vivid
writing.  But I still think it’s worth
asking:   what’s a mystery novel?

Weekend Update: October 5-6, 2019

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will be posts by William Andrews (Monday), Brenda Buchanan (Tuesday), Susan Vaughan (Thursday) and John Clark (Friday).

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

[image error]from Kaitlyn Dunnett: Good news for those of you who subscribe to Kindle Unlimited and have not yet read my Liss MacCrimmon mysteries. The first book in the series, Kilt Dead, is available through this program for at least the next 90 days. If you aren’t in Kindle Unlimited, don’t worry. You can still buy the e-book from all the usual retail outlets. In this one, professional Scottish dancer Liss (think Riverdance, only Scottish) returns to her old hometown of Moosetookalook, Maine to recover from a career-ending injury and help out at the family business, Moosetookalook Scottish Emporium. As in all cozy mysteries, murder and mayhem soon follow, and Liss herself becomes the prime suspect in a case that’s particularly baffling because everyone, including Liss, seemed to be very fond of the victim.

also from Kaitlyn Dunnett: the winner of the drawing for an advance reading copy of A VIEW TO A KILT is Sharon Cales. Thank you to all who entered by leaving a comment on Tuesday’s post.

 

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

Beginners’ Luck

For reasons that might best go unexamined, I recently signed up to take a drawing class, having some vague notion of being able to illustrate a book one day. I’ve always been impressed by people who could render a recognizable image using pen or pencil or paint and I thought it would enhance my ability to concentrate a little if I spent three solid hours once a week focusing on drawing.

Predictably, it started off as a mess, in no small part due to my own perfectionism and an inability to accept that I wasn’t already a museum-quality visual artist. The first class found me fuming and fussing, probably audibly, about everything the class was not: a technical approach to drawing, a discussion of first principles, a demonstration of visual concepts like perspective, access lines, contour lines, etc. Instead, what I had wandered into was the kind of hobbyist course you’d find in a senior citizens’ center (no comments on my age, please) a roundup of different types of media, some undirected still-life drawing, and a “critique” session that generally focused on what everyone loved about certain images.

Second week, slightly better. I did recognize that part of what drove my dissatisfaction was that I’d come in with certain preconceptions about what the course would be that did not, ahem, comport with the actual description in the course catalog. Still frustrated by my inability to render anything on paper that looked the way it looked in real life, but I was a little more accepting of what was going on. Not of myself, however—fortunately (or not), the medium in which we were working allowed me to erase everything I’d done unsuccessfully for the first two hours and start over . . . I did manage to subdue my urge to throw my graphite pencil at the wall and run out the door to the nearest bar.

This past Monday was the third class, into which I went with a minimal requirement of myself—not to be a jerk. To relax into whatever we were doing, stop striving for a success I hadn’t even come close to earning. And there, of course, was the point I’d missed.[image error]

I was a beginner again, which is one of the most difficult things an adult can take on: dropping pretensions of expertise, embracing the ugly and inept attempts that are always the fruit of first work, essentially giving up the ghost of perfection—at least, unearned perfection.

I had to remember there was a time when I had no sense of how a sentence should go, or how to describe a character, or where to soften fast action with slow, all those thousands of decisions I learned to make over time, practice, and failures. The idea of ten thousand hours to mastery has become a cliché, but there is no doubt that we need to heed the words of the joke I first read in a Bennet Cerf book. A tourist asks a passerby on the street in New York how to get to Carnegie Hall. “Practice, practice, practice,” is the answer. Which is only another way of saying to myself: Don’t be so afraid to be a beginner. It might even bring you luck.

When The Next Scene Eludes You

Kate Flora: Fall, with the crisp air and vibrant colors, always inspires me to write. Or it [image error]did until recently. Lately, I seem to have the attention span of a gnat and the creativity of a knothole. Probably not something I should admit to readers who are awaiting the next book, right? But we all go through these fallow phases when the words won’t flow. Sometimes because we just don’t know where the story goes next. In my case, it’s more of a problem of too much on my plate. I’m inches from the end of a non-series book, Gutted, but I have a short story due, and there are things I’ve promised other writers, and I’m supposed to go on vacation.

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https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1020462-baked-artichoke-pasta-with-creamy-goat-cheese?action=click&module=RecipeBox&pgType=recipebox-page®ion=all&rank=0

What to do? Right now, as is often the case in recent years, I am feeling grateful that I am not new to the blank page, the empty chair, the waiting screen, and my reader’s expectations. I know that if I make myself sit here even when I’m restless and cranky, the work will get done.

And then there are those moments when even the confidence that I can power through that next scene, and figure out who is in danger of being killed next, fails me. My solution? Head for the kitchen.

I sometimes think that my kitchen should have a lock like a bank vault, so it closes after breakfast and cannot be reentered until it is time to make dinner. The kitchen is a very dangerous place. I’m one of those people who read cookbooks for fun. Who has files and files of recipes waiting to be tried. Whose New York Times recipe box is full of things I’m going to one day make.

Lest you think that I am cooking to avoid my work, let me set you straight. Cooking is a marvelous opportunity to the let mind roam free (so long as all the ingredients make it into the pot) and often, by the time that whatever I am making is in the oven, my characters have shown me where we are going next, and I can return to my desk and start shaping the scene that eluded me earlier.

Perhaps this see-saw of writing and cooking accounts for the fact that I am not slim? But in other ways, it is the perfect dance for a writer. I cook up plots at my desk, and cook up more plots while cooking up dinner downstairs.

Friends, do you have proven strategies that help you over the work hump and send you back refreshed or reinspired? If you do, I hope you’ll share.

The Most Useful Class I Took in High School (and a chance to win an advance reading copy of Kaitlyn’s next mystery)

[image error]Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett here, contemplating the lasting influence of the things I learned in high school. To be truthful, my fondest memories aren’t of classes, but rather of the junior and senior class plays and the school-wide musical we put on. The teachers involved in those weren’t the same ones who taught the courses I had to take for a Regents diploma. Instead they offered instruction in art and music and encouraged those who participated in drama as an extra-curricular activity to develop self-confidence and reach for the sky.

In addition to English, history, math, and sciences, there was a tiny bit of time left over for electives. I did take one art class, but that’s not the subject of this post. The most useful class I took in high school, hands down, was personal typing.

[image error]This was the mid-1960s, so we sat at huge old manual typewriters while the teacher, Mrs. Calhoun, paced between the aisles correcting posture and hand position and occasionally expressing the opinion that we were wasting our time learning to type if we weren’t planning to work in an office. I can’t remember now how I felt about that, but thinking back on the experience, I can see that it had certain similarities to the piano lessons I took for a few years as a kid. I was never able to master that particular musical instrument, but I did develop a modest proficiency on the typewriter keyboard.

[image error]The skill has stood me in good stead ever since. The first typewriter I owned was a portable Smith Corona, still a manual. In college, I made extra money typing papers for other students. I wasn’t the best typist going, but I was a wiz with white-out, even on carbon copies.

When I got serious about a writing career, although it would still be several years before I sold anything, I bought an office model manual typewriter. It was huge, and heavy, but I wrote my first three published books on it, as well as a fair number of unsold projects—everything from science fiction short stories to very long, very bad historical novels.

[image error]I never did get the hang of electric typewriters, although I did own a portable one for a while. I had to use an IBM Selectric when I worked at the University of Maine’s Mantor Library back in the 1980s and I hated it. It just plain went too fast for me. My fingers got tangled up and the typos multiplied. Even with “correction ribbon” that was no fun.

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me and my Tandy 1000 c.1987

Then along came the personal computer. I made a smooth transition to the keyboard of a Tandy 1000. Through a fair number of pc models since, I’ve never looked back. My fingers aren’t as agile as they used to be, so I make even more mistakes, but it’s oh-so-easy to correct them now. I hope Mrs. Calhoun would be proud. I use the skill she taught me every day, and I have sixty published books and numerous short stories to show for it.

What was the most useful class you took in high school? Leave a comment to answer that question and you’ll be entered in a drawing to receive an advance reading copy of my January title, A View to a Kilt.

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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.

Journey of a Book

Susan Vaughan here. My next book, Hidden Obsession, will be released this coming Wednesday. Reaching that achievement has been a long journey, eleven years, to be exact. Not that I’ve been writing it that long, but the germ for it sprouted that long ago as I wrote Primal Obsession, published in 2008 .

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Original 2008 Cover

That romantic suspense novel tells the story of the couple Annie and Sam. Annie is an investigative reporter in Portland, Maine, who has been covering the crimes of a serial [image error]killer dubbed the Hunter, who murdered her good friend, an avid outdoorswoman. An avid indoorswoman, Annie books a wilderness canoe and camping trip to spread her friend’s ashes.

Sam is a former Major Leaguer (yes, Red Sox) who was injured and is now struggling to make a new life working in his family’s wilderness business. He and Annie banter and argue until the woods turn deadly, forcing them to work together. And, of course, fall in love. Annie’s brother Justin, a Maine state police detective, worries about her because the Hunter has contacted her. But Justin believes she’ll be safe in the northern Maine woods because the killer kidnaps his victims in towns and cities first and “hunts” them in the woods.

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Anyone who’s read “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connor knows what that means. That book features a romantic suspense set in the wilderness and some police procedure with Justin, the detective heading up the Hunter case, who remains unaware of the danger to Annie and the other five campers until late in the plot.

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New 2019 Cover

Long after I finished Primal Obsession, Justin kept nagging at me. Other authors know what that is like. You create characters who intrigue you and you want to keep revisiting and expanding on them. That’s what it was like for me. Fast forward to a couple of [image error]years ago. Under the influence (of Maine Crime Writers), I decided to try writing a cozy mystery, working title “Murder by the Book.” I chose the title because the female sleuth was/is a freelance writer. Financial straits force Sheri to return to her Maine peninsula hometown to ghostwrite an elderly woman’s memoir. She wants to avoid revisiting her tragic past while doing her job. But after a brutal murder and attacks on her best friend and her client, she can’t help being deeply involved. And, in the mode of amateur sleuth, try to uncover the murderer.

My obvious choice for the detective was Justin. For those who don’t know, in the state of Maine only the largest cities have police departments that investigate major crimes like homicides. The detectives of the Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit are in charge of those investigations throughout the rest of the state. I was excited to have a chance to further flesh out the character of Justin and give him a plot. Developing internal conflict and backstory for him wasn’t coming to me, and I didn’t know why, so I just kept writing and hoped it would work out. By the time I’d written about half the draft, my critique partners guessed the murderer’s identity. Sigh.

First, I should never have let anyone read chapters before I’d finished the whole thing and developed the other characters into suspects. One of the best pieces of advice about romantic suspense (and mysteries as well) I’ve heard is from bestselling author Sandra Brown, that everyone in the story should have a secret. Second, I realized the reason Justin’s character was too flat was that he had no relationships, but was focused solely on the case. In Primal Obsession, he was more personally involved, with his sister in danger. In the new story, he needed something at stake—a romance with Sheri.

[image error]Rather than struggle against the current, I started afresh and rewrote the story as a romantic suspense, no easy task. It took me two years to write what has become Hidden Obsession . Now Justin has a strong internal conflict and backstory, a good reason to hate secrets, one reason he’s a cop. And his truth seeking collides exactly with Sheri’s need to protect her secret. More than its predecessor, the new book is part police procedural and part romantic suspense, and I enjoyed meshing the two. I owe big thanks to one of our Maine Crime Writers, author Bruce Robert Coffin, for advice on police procedure.

Writing this book has been a journey and a challenge, and I’m happy and relieved to send it into the world. The e-book is on pre-order at Amazon. On the release date, October 2, both the e-book and print version will be available to purchase.

 

Weekend Update: September 28-29, 2019

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

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

DEADLINE: The “Where Would You Put the Body?” contest – late summer/early fall edition closes on September 30. How do you enter? Send a photograph of your chosen spot to: WritingAboutCrime@gmail.com with “Where Would You Put the Body” in the subject line. There will be prizes for First, Second, and Third place—books of course and other Maine goodies. You may enter no more than three photographs, each one entered separately. They must be of Maine places and you must identify the place in your submission. Photos must be the submitter’s original work.

 Susan Vaughan: The digital version of my latest romantic suspense, Hidden Obsession, is available now for pre-order on Amazon. When released on October 2, both the e-book and print book will be available for purchase. Here’s a brief description: Revisiting the past can heal… or lead to murder. Sheri’s reluctant return to Maine coincides with a murder. She finds herself in the killer’s crosshairs and in the arms of determined blue-eyed cop Justin. Can he solve the case before the killer carries out a special plan for Sheri?

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

An Author’s Life: Editing

Today I finished the first edits of book four in my Oceanographer Mara Tusconi mystery series. So it’s time to kick back and celebrate with a glass of wine, right? Alas, not at all. As any author knows very well, this might be the beginning of the end, but it’s certainly not the actual dénouement.

My nearly-a-year-in-the-making draft now goes to the editor. When I finally get it back I’ll need that glass of wine for an entirely different reason.

It’s not that the editor dislikes my writing. Not at all. She’s very supportive. But an editor’s job is to “correct errors and ensure clarity and accuracy”—and she does. “You said this there and now you say this here”, she tells me, and “This doesn’t make sense”.

And I thought, given my scientific training, that logic and “making sense” would come pretty easily. Note to self from Canadian author Robin Sharma: “Mastery begins with humility”.

The editor also ferrets out my occasional misuse of punctuation. For example, I remain confused about the Oxford comma. Is it correct to say “My favorite sports are kayaking, skiing, and running” or “My favorite sports are kayaking, skiing and running,”? (I think you just need to be consistent).

After the last editing event, I bought a grammar guide I’d recommend: “The Best Punctuation Book, Period” by June Casagrade. Gotta love a grammar book with a sense of humor.

In addition to the text, there’s the cover. Happily, the designer understands my work and comes up with great visuals. But I’ve learned that I overlook obvious mistakes in images—like omission of the apostrophe in my name—so I ask a graphic artist friend to review the draft cover.

Finally, there are what editors call “praise” but the rest of us know as endorsements or maybe blurbs. Watch someone pick up a new book, and you’ll realize that the back cover is at least as important as the front. Most people study the front for a moment and then turn the book over and scan the endorsements. Good ones are written by well-known, relevant authors and give readers a sense of the book.

One very busy Maine Crime Writer wrote an endorsement for my last book (thank you Barbara Ross), and I will approach another for the new one (hope you have time, Darcy Scott!).