Lea Wait's Blog, page 186

A Trivial Pursuit

Made a trip to the other Portland this month, where triple digit temperatures poached my brain and also got me tangled up in a riot between the Patriot Boys and the Love Bugs in Tom McCall Waterfront Park. [image error]I actually toasted the whole thing from the fifth floor of the Marriott, with a drink that was not fruit juice in my hand.

Then the doggy spell we’ve had here pretty much shut down my cerebral cortex for another week or so. Just as I got out from under those hot-weather doldrums this morning, I was just in time to pick up the newspaper and read that PETA wants to erect a roadside memorial [image error]for the 4500 or so lobsters tragically lost when a truck overturned on Route 1 near Cooks Corner in Brunswick and skidded down an embankment, dumping the unfortunate crustaceans out onto the ground. No survivors, apparently, due to a combination of temperature and a fresh water bath from the fire hoses getting them off the pavement.

I don’t usually get too excited about tweets, but this one from our own Sarah Graves sums up the situation for me: “Don’t know how many of those lobsters were on their way to their forever homes.”

While I have to say a five-foot granite obelisk might contribute to the beauty of that long boring stretch of road, I have to wonder if we don’t have a few more pressing matters to worry about. It seems to me this minor hoo-haw is a perfect example of how we’re losing the ability to identify the important and replacing it with the hundreds of little hits of dopamine or outrage that we get from [image error]Facebook, Twitter, Candy Crush, or @realDonaldTrump.

Flint, Michigan still has little potable water, children are still separated from their parents on our southern border because of their color, American citizens are being stripped of their citizenship also because of color, our governor thinks all rights and pleasures should be reserved to white people, preferably men, and we can’t mourn a genuine American hero without turning him into a political grenade.

I know, I know. I’m in the entertainment business. I’m not supposed to think? feel? care? about politics (and someone will surely take me to task for getting above my station). But as much as I’d like to make this lobster thing entertaining, I can’t for the life of me sustain a laugh over it. At least the Patriot Boys and the Love Bugs were rioting about something important. This ridiculous and narrow-minded scheme to memorialize “suffering” crustaceans, for goodness sake, is a trivial stand-in for how we’re spending our days. How much longer, do you suppose, until we regain a sense of proportion?

Loons and Lakes; Laughter and Longing

 

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Young loons gather in the fall after their parents have already left Maine lakes. They will spend several years on the ocean until they mature and seek out a lake and nesting partner.

Sandra Neily here: It’s that time of impending fall when young loons, not yet mated for life, gather in adolescent gangs around Maine’s lakes and ponds.  During the day they practice take-offs with flailing wings and loud inexpert splashing.  Some day, they will surprise themselves and actually lift off the rapidly chilling water, embracing their ancient migratory urges. At night their calls to absent parents and the lake’s night time sky are so loud they wake us even when dawn is a hint of gray.

Many people feel that the cries of loons are the heart of Maine’s lake regions, its “heart’s deep core” so to speak.  We take the loon serenades, the clean, cold smell of a trout in our hands and the feeling of that first shocking swim of the season … our lake experiences … with us, like some spiritual hydration backpack.  We drink from these memories when we are far away or when the lakes are locked into a vast, silent, snow sculpture.

W. B. Yeats understood the enduring power of lakes:

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore,

While I stand on the roadway or on the pavements grey.

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Young loons rest on their parents’ backs or are hidden deep in grass-lined coves … until they are able to dive and fish.

 I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Yeats wasn’t thinking of the more pedestrian side of lakes when he wrote in that same poem (“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”) that he would “build a small cabin there…and live alone in the bee loud glade.” But that’s what thousands and thousands of us hope to do when we seek out lakes.

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You are too close to a loon when it rises up, breast arched and wings beating behind it. Please back off.

So I will take a moment to shout out lakes’ contributions beyond loons and “bee loud glades.” I do this so the next time your legislator or congressperson says something silly about conservation, loons, or clean water regulations you will have this fact at your fingertips. Maine Lakes deliver over $2.5 billion of economic value each year. Lake use supports over 8,000 jobs each year. That’s more yearly jobs than Bath Iron Works has ever delivered—and we all know how politicians turn out to support those jobs.

Back to loons. They are on my mind this week, writing a scene for Deadly Turn, my second Mystery in Maine, where I sent the narrator and her dog out to meet them.

‘From the screened sleeping porch, I watched Pock swim the cove biting bits of water he thought was floating debris. The lake was his pool and playground and often he had company. Wings tucked tight to their bodies, our resident loons torpedoed themselves back and forth under his belly, knowing he’d never catch them. From the far side of the cove, one bird raised a haunted cry. Loons are supposed to be the soul of lakes, but there’s edgy insanity to their loud laugher—high notes that sound strangled as they drop into silence. In coves all over the lake, other loons answered, their territorial cries overlapping echoes until they were wild orchestral music silenced by an unseen conductor who allowed one last lingering note—a performance that sang itself into my blood like a transfusion.” (Excerpt from Deadly Trespass)

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The presence of loons speaks to a healthy ecosystem where small fish and other tasty creatures are abundant.

I think Henry David Thoreau should have the last word on loons and lakes. He thinks even a solitary loon on a lake is really like a “wave.” Well, that makes Thoreau-sense: nature invested with more than just nature. If you read his The Maine Woods (1864) there are hundreds of tight descriptive nuggets that wrap loons and lakes and mountains and trout and moose and spruce into a sense of longing even as he is among them.

I often feel the same way.

“The spruce and cedar on its shores, hung with gray lichens, looked at a distance like the ghosts of trees. Ducks were sailing here and there on its surface, and a solitary loon, like a more living wave, — a vital spot on the lake’s surface, — laughed and frolicked, and showed its straight leg, for our amusement.” (Henry David Thoreau)[image error]

More: Watch a ME Game Warden rescue a loon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f26_1HopHM

Loon calls: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Common_Loon/soundsM

Maine Audubon’s Loon Project: https://www.maineaudubon.org/projects/loons/

Info on lakes’ value: https://www.maine.gov/dep/water/lakes/research.html

Sandy’s novel, “Deadly Trespass, A Mystery in Maine,” won a Mystery Writers of America award and was a finalist in the Women’s Fiction Writers Association “Rising Star” contest. This year, she’s been nominated for a Maine Literary Award. Find her novel at all Shermans Books and on Amazon. Find more info on the video trailer and Sandy’s website.  The second Mystery in Maine, “Deadly Turn,” will be published in 2018. She likes to kayak into small coves, sending out soft hoots that sound like loon parents looking for their chicks. 

The “Other” Maine

[image error]Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, today inspired by the end of the summer tourist season to point out that there’s another Maine that most of folks “from away” probably never see.

Several of my friends and acquaintances visited Maine this summer. One never got farther north than Portland. Another took a trip on a cruise ship that stopped in, among other coastal locations,  Bar Harbor, Rockland, Camden, and Boothbay Harbor. A third visited Acadia National Park and sailed on one of Maine’s schooners. As a side trip, she visited the Duck of Justice at the Bangor Police Department.

None of them saw a moose.

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Moose at Moosehead Lake

This should have been a clue that they were only brushing the surface. Although we’re small in relation to Texas or Alaska, we’re a big state compared to our neighbors. We have 3,478 miles of coastline, but that only accounts for a small portion of the state. Fishing for lobster is an important industry, but—trust me on this—there are Mainers who don’t like any kind of seafood. My late father-in-law used to call lobsters “trash fish” because back before they started getting so much good PR from summer people, the locals didn’t consider them fit for anything but fertilizer. Folks who only visit the coast seem to equate Maine with getting out on or into the water, going to clambakes, and enjoying panoramic ocean views. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve done any of those things.

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The “other” Maine is the part of the state away from the coast and beyond the bedroom communities surrounding Portland. Some equate it with the second congressional district, which isn’t far off the mark except that, in all honesty, there is more than one “other” Maine. The area I know best is the western Maine mountains, where I live and in which I set my Liss MacCrimmon mysteries. We have lots of trees, lakes, and streams, plus ski areas, apple orchards, campgrounds, and trails for hiking, snowmobiles, and ATVs. Some of these same tourist attractions are found in a big chunk of sparsely populated land located, approximately, in the middle of the state. It includes Baxter State Park, Moosehead Lake, and the recently established Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. For variety, there are the flat, fairly empty spaces to the north, where the economy revolves around the annual potato harvest, and the stretch along the border with Canada, 611 miles in all, where you’ll find French spoken right along with English. The Franco-American heritage is alive and well in many parts of Maine. All of these areas, and probably a few I haven’t thought of, are distinctly different from either Portland or the coast.

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As a general rule, the other Maine is politically conservative, although rather than register with any political party a great many of the residents list themselves as “no marks” and vote (with the glaring exception of the most recent elections) for the candidates who exhibit common sense. Most of the towns in these rural areas hold annual festivals of some sort. A surprising number of them celebrate blueberries. Old Home Days are also numerous. One town, Lisbon Falls, honors Moxie, the official soft drink of the State of Maine. Locally, we shop at Hannaford or Food City for groceries and Renys (aka Chez René) or Mardens for bargains, pig out on Giffords’ Ice Cream in the summer, prefer wearing jeans and t-shirts to dressing up, and root for the Red Sox, the Pats, and the University of Maine Black Bears.

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And the only time anyone says “A-yuh” is when we’re having fun at the expense of tourists. It’s usually accompanied by the carefully considered opinion that “you can’t get there from here.”

Mainers have a wicked good sense of humor . . . at least in the opinion of other Mainers.

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Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett is the author of nearly sixty traditionally published books written under several names. 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 (Overkilt—November 2018) and the “Deadly Edits” series (Crime & Punctuation) as Kaitlyn and the historical Mistress Jaffrey Mysteries (Murder in a Cornish Alehouse) as Kathy. The latter series is a spin-off from her earlier “Face Down” mysteries and is set in Elizabethan England. Her most recent collection of short stories is 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 www.TudorWomen.com

Weekend Update: September 1-3, 2018

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will posts by Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Tuesday), Sandy Neily (Wednesday), Dick Cass (Thursday), and Lea Wait (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:  From August 30 until September 30, all major e-book retailers are reducing the price of the first Liss MacCrimmon mystery, Kilt Dead, to $1.99. The regular price is $5.99. If you missed how it all started, this is your chance to catch up.

from Sandra Neily: I will be speaking about my novel Deadly Trespass at the Simpson Memorial Library, in Carmel Maine (easy to reach anywhere from Newport to Bangor) on September 6 at 6:30 PM. [image error]I’ll be giving away a free copy but also sharing  other authors who infuse their plots, characters, and themes with the natural world. You can find  a copy of “Nature Themed Fiction” recommendations at https://www.authorsandraneily.com/naturebased-fiction/

 

 

Kate Flora is pleased to share the news that her crime story collection, Careful What You Wish For is available on Amazon. Currently as an e-book, soon as a physical book as well. https://www.amazon.com/Careful-What-You-Wish-Retribution-ebook/dp/B07G2NJ3DZ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1535575579&sr=8- 1&keywords=Kate+Flora+Careful+What+You+Wish+For

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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

You wonder where Maine writers work, don’t you?

With apologies for accidentally posting this on the wrong day…here we go again. Here are some snapshots of where we work. Our desks, our dining tables, our porches, and perhaps some surprises.

Kate Flora: A few years back, we built a small room at the top of the cottage, absolutely a “room with a view.” A view so nice, perhaps, that it would be tempting to watch the cove instead of working. Or to pretend you’re in a tree house. Imagine yourself here . . .

 

 

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Maureen Milliken: I have a desk and a desktop computer, but it’s piled with stuff. Even if it wasn’t, I end up gravitating to places to write without knowing why. Kind of like my writing process in general.[image error]

My second book I wrote in a living room chair, leaning over with my laptop on an ottoman. I had severe forearm pain for months after. I’m not making that up.

The one I recently finished, Bad News Travels Fast (due out October 31, thanks for asking!), I ended up at the kitchen table for most of the final sprint to the finish. I don’t know why. I just did.

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: My workspace has changed from time to time over the last forty-plus years, but it has pretty much stayed somewhere in my office. The first picture is from when I was still banging out manuscripts on a manual typewriter. The second is my work area today. Of course, in good weather, when I’m in the read through/revise stage, I can be found on the screen porch with the cat, working on a printout on my lap with nary a desk in sight.

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And yes, to those who wonder, the photo above was taken AFTER I weeded out hundreds of reference books.

[image error]Susan Vaughan: I work at my laptop here at a desk my husband built years ago. The laptops have changed, but the desk has not. Whatever computer I buy new must fit into that space. I have shelves for the reference books I use all the time, slots for cords to go down to the power strips, and plenty of room for the mess of papers and sticky notes that are part of my process.

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Oh, and the printer is out of the photos, off to the left.

I do plot and plan ahead to some degree, but each page, each chapter is a struggle, more so as I age.

Barb Ross: I love my new office in Portland. We moved almost a year ago, but this top photo was taken artfully to avoid including the boxes still lurking in the corner.

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Here’s the same study again, the day after I handed in my most recent manuscript. A little bit messier!

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Brenda Buchanan: I’m a writer who needs to work at a desk or table. Blame it on my rigid Catholic school girlhood, when I learned grammar and composition at one of those desks with a hinged top and (empty) inkwell. I simply think best when I’m sitting up more or less straight with my screen at eye level.

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Brenda writes here

This is the work space I chose from several options at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century cottage I was blessed to have all to myself for a week last September at the Marilyn Faison Artist Residency on Peaks Island, a project of the amazing Illustration Institute (which defines “artist” to include writers.)

I’m excited to have been invited back again this year, so this is where I’ll be for a week in mid-September, sans internet connection, with only erratic cellphone service, but plenty of uninterrupted time to hang out with my imaginary friends.

Bruce Robert Coffin: I’m a bit of a vagabond when it comes to my preferred writing space. I wrote my first Detective Byron mystery on an IPad while seated in a chair in my living room. In the summer months you’ll often find me in a quiet spot at one of the many libraries in and around Greater Portland, hiding from the many warm weather distractions (i.e. working out, golfing, hiking, mowing). At the moment I am seated on my back deck listening to the birds singing in the trees while I work on Byron #4, probably because I can can sense cooler weather approaching.

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But my favorite place to work for most of the year is in my finished attic, tucked into a corner in the space that was previously my art studio. Transforming the space from one of paints, canvases, and brushes to one of novel writing has been a slow and ongoing process. I envision my writing area to look more like Barbara Ross’s first photo and perhaps it will one day. I did treat myself to a real desk this year. The cherry desk with leather top, a major upgrade from the old drafting table on which I used to create watercolors, was sort of a celebratory gift to me for finishing the third Byron novel, Beyond the Truth.

Sandra Neily: I have a real office (where family sleeps when visiting so I go to the MidCoast Hospital Cafeteria to work when I am displaced as it’s very quiet on Sundays and evenings!). I am also packed to travel with a book bag library and wall charts that I hang up to remind me of plot lines I hope to follow. Here I am, last week, set up to work in Waltham, Vermont at my friends’ dining room table. My screen savor reminds me that eagles must both live and die in my next novel, and when I needed a break, Raven and I went out the door to talk over scene options with the cows. They told me to “milk it for all it’s worth.”

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August, and a Bit After

John Clark watching a nighttime thunderstorm move eastward toward Penobscot Bay. We’re a couple days away from September, but I’ve had August’s unique personality on my mind for the past couple weeks. While (for me, at least) June and July often blend together, August is a different breed of cat. October is my favorite month, but August and September do a darn good job of setting the stage. Below are some thoughts as to why.

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At some point in August, there’s a subtle shift. Yes, the days begin to be perceptibly shorter, but there are ones when humidity vanishes and the hint of cool portending fall rides in on quiet breezes. Those are the days when our back deck casts a spell on me that’s more powerful than anything smacking of responsibility. Even the hummingbirds flitting past my head to sip nectar at the two feeders, seem to voice their silent approval of my spending hours on end baking in the warmth, sipping brewed coffee and reading while jets overhead leave stubby contrails as they wing west and south. The nights that follow are equally seductive. After sweating through two months of summer heat and humidity, a few cool, dry nights make sleep easy for Beth and I.

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June had us tending and weeding the garden, watering daily as it was so dry. July found us watering almost as often while reaping the first veggies of the season. August, however, is a month of satiation and assessment. We seek out neighbors and friends as well as bring excess to the Tri-Town Food Pantry because there’s no way we can eat everything the garden produces. It’s also a time to assess what failed to grow, or grow well. Last year, we had more broccoli than we knew what to do with. In fact, the plants looked more like high bush blueberry plants by early September. This year, we’ve barely gotten a meal a week. Our cauliflower is equally disappointing. The plants are dwarfed and have yet to head out. We had four cucumber plants in June. Now we have one and it produces in fits and starts. Critters (either coons or a bear) decimated our corn.[image error]

 

There were successes, too. I fooled the wildlife with a backup corn patch across the road that’s providing delicious ears aplenty. The melons that were a bust last year, are making up for it. Ditto the yellow beans and our row and a half of soybeans are busting their humps to shoot out pods everywhere. I planted thirteen year old eggplant seeds, but expected nothing, so Beth bought four plants. The ancient seeds all sprouted, so we’re lavishing two kinds of purple goodies on eggplant lovers near and far. Chard was another surprise. Beth thought we hadn’t planted any, so she bought a six pack of plants, only to realize that one row she thought were beets turned out to be rainbow chard plants. As a result, we’re knee deep in the stuff. Good thing we like it…And let us not talk about basil. It’s flourishing on both sides of the road along with red, green and Chinese cabbage.

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There are other visible reminders of the coming changes that are unique to Maine. As the air cools sharply overnight, it triggers river fog that snakes through the valleys of Somerset County. As you travel south on I-05, it’s easy to see where the Sebasticook River lies and even easier to follow the Kennebec as you near Fairfield. When the moon and nighttime sky cooperate, the Perseid meteor shower gives us an excuse to stay up later and sit on the back deck late into the night. We talk about drifting across Great Moose Lake in our canoe some night to get the full benefit, but my bad knee refuses to let that happen. Sunsets also seem more flamboyant in August, perhaps in hopes of outdoing September’s.

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The dry days also encourage farmers to get their haying done, filling the air with that wonderful smell, akin, but distinct from a freshly mown lawn. Neighborhood kids start to panic, quietly at first, then more openly as they realize that seemingly endless summer vacation is about to end. The familiar sound of an early morning school bus stopping just down the street began two mornings ago, while at our monthly book discussion last Tuesday evening, talk turned to who was heading south and when. Those of us who stay put, were bemused by a description of a 55+ community one couple was going to in South Carolina. The entire complex stretches close to three miles. I’ll take my pellet stove and pile of books any day.

The bean plants have been pulled, apples raked up (although that will continue for another month at least), with the best ones made into applesauce. Blackberries are picked and adorn breakfast cereal, while we’re at that point where the tomato crop is finding its way through our Foley food mill before we add basil and other goodies to make spaghetti sauce. What does August mean to you?

You wonder where Maine writers work, don’t you?

Here are some snapshots of where we work. Our desks, our dining tables, our porches, and perhaps some surprises.

Kate Flora: A few years back, we built a small room at the top of the cottage, absolutely a “room with a view.” A view so nice, perhaps, that it would be tempting to watch the cove instead of working. Or to pretend you’re in a tree house. Imagine yourself here . . .

 

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Maureen Milliken: I have a desk and a desktop computer, but it’s piled with stuff. Even if it wasn’t, I end up gravitating to places to write without knowing why. Kind of like my writing process in general.[image error]

My second book I wrote in a living room chair, leaning over with my laptop on an ottoman. I had severe forearm pain for months after. I’m not making that up.

The one I recently finished, Bad News Travels Fast (due out October 31, thanks for asking!), I ended up at the kitchen table for most of the final sprint to the finish. I don’t know why. I just did.

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: My workspace has changed from time to time over the last forty-plus years, but it has pretty much stayed somewhere in my office. The first picture is from when I was still banging out manuscripts on a manual typewriter. The second is my work area today. Of course, in good weather, when I’m in the read through/revise stage, I can be found on the screen porch with the cat, working on a printout on my lap with nary a desk in sight.

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And yes, to those who wonder, the photo above was taken AFTER I weeded out hundreds of reference books.

[image error]Susan Vaughan: I work at my laptop here at a desk my husband built years ago. The laptops have changed, but the desk has not. Whatever computer I buy new must fit into that space. I have shelves for the reference books I use all the time, slots for cords to go down to the power strips, and plenty of room for the mess of papers and sticky notes that are part of my process.

[image error]

Oh, and the printer is out of the photos, off to the left.

I do plot and plan ahead to some degree, but each page, each chapter is a struggle, more so as I age.

Barb Ross: I love my new office in Portland. We moved almost a year ago, but this top photo was taken artfully to avoid including the boxes still lurking in the corner.

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Here’s the same study again, the day after I handed in my most recent manuscript. A little bit messier!

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Brenda Buchanan: I’m a writer who needs to work at a desk or table. Blame it on my rigid Catholic school girlhood, when I learned grammar and composition at one of those desks with a hinged top and (empty) inkwell. I simply think best when I’m sitting up more or less straight with my screen at eye level.

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Brenda writes here

This is the work space I chose from several options at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century cottage I was blessed to have all to myself for a week last September at the Marilyn Faison Artist Residency on Peaks Island, a project of the amazing Illustration Institute (which defines “artist” to include writers.)

I’m excited to have been invited back again this year, so this is where I’ll be for a week in mid-September, sans internet connection, with only erratic cellphone service, but plenty of uninterrupted time to hang out with my imaginary friends.

Bruce Robert Coffin: I’m a bit of a vagabond when it comes to my preferred writing space. I wrote my first Detective Byron mystery on an IPad while seated in a chair in my living room. In the summer months you’ll often find me in a quiet spot at one of the many libraries in and around Greater Portland, hiding from the many warm weather distractions (i.e. working out, golfing, hiking, mowing). At the moment I am seated on my back deck listening to the birds singing in the trees while I work on Byron #4, probably because I can can sense cooler weather approaching.

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But my favorite place to work for most of the year is in my finished attic, tucked into a corner in the space that was previously my art studio. Transforming the space from one of paints, canvases, and brushes to one of novel writing has been a slow and ongoing process. I envision my writing area to look more like Barbara Ross’s first photo and perhaps it will one day. I did treat myself to a real desk this year. The cherry desk with leather top, a major upgrade from the old drafting table on which I used to create watercolors, was sort of a celebratory gift to me for finishing the third Byron novel, Beyond the Truth.

 

 

Miami Vice!

So I took my son to the University of Miami for his freshman year. It was only my second time in Florida. The campus at University of Miami is beautiful. Palm trees and sunshine abound. So it made me wonder what about crime fiction in the Sun State. Who are Florida’s best crime writers?

 

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Of course at the top of this list must be Carl Hiaasen. I remember reading STRIP TEASE and loving his energy and the way he writes characters. SKIN TIGHT features a crazy character named Chemo who has a prosthetic arm that is a weed whacker.

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Oh, and here I am below on the campus debating taking a dip. Did you know that south Florida is the only place in the world where there are alligators and crocodiles? Yes, and snakes too.

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There’s Tim Doresy. I read one of his books awhile ago, but GATOR-A-GO-GO is supposedly a classic. I’ll have to try that one some day.

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Here’s my son in his first day on campus working hard,

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Last on the list is DARKLY DREAMING DEXTER. Did you know that DEXTER was a book series before being a TV show?  Darkness in the sunshine state.

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Florida has a lot of beautiful sights and many great crime writers. Be sure to check them out. GO CANES!

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Lost in the Archives

Kate Flora: Later this week, we are giving you a tour of where we all work. I’ll include a [image error]photo of one of my desks. The neater one. The one where you can tell there’s wood beneath the paper. My other desk has drowned in a sea of paper.

Some of this paper are the many, many drafts of the books I’ve written. Before most of my editing happened on the screen, I would usually go through four to six (sometimes more!) drafts of every book. Now my office is full of these drafts, along with files of research for the books, and much much more.

The reason I am late blogging today is that I got lost in my archives. This morning, my publisher having suggested that I start a new series, I went digging through the files, trying to find the three draft books in my unpublished Ross McIntyre series. I got covered in dust, and unearth what I believe are the first and third, and a piece of the second. The third is, of course, missing chapter one, and I have no idea where it might be.

This sounds like I am flakier than I really am. Everything was also saved on disks. But the disks belong to an ancient operating system and neither my current computer nor my last two, can read them. Yes. It’s true. In one corner of my office, I have a stack of retired computers, saved against just such a day as this. But they, alas, are too new to read books I wrote back in the nineties.

[image error]Okay, I say to myself. I will make it my next project to go back through the Ross McIntyres and see if they still have potential. But maybe, instead, I could work on my architect series. That’s one where I started writing book one, realized I had two stories, unraveled the plots, took the book apart, and finished book one. Originally, it was called “Death is in the Details” but as the plot evolved, it became “Bones are Bad for Business.” Great. I found two notebooks. One had some early chapters and story treatments. The other had part of the book, but not the ending. It does have some of the cool research, where a generous police officer in Delaware sent me reams of information about how to exhume a buried body. The research became very helpful when I was working on Finding Amy.But there is no sign of the ending of the book. Next I will go and look in the basement.

[image error]There is also no sign, anywhere, of the beginning of book two, where Lavinia Malcolm, our heroine, becomes the prime suspect when her awful ex-husband is found nail-gunned to the foundation of a building she designed, where she is supervising the construction.

I also have files of my interviews with architects as I worked to try and see the world through the eyes of an architect. I wanted to know what Lavinia, Vinnie, saw when she looked at a building or walked into a room. It took months, but one day, suddenly, I was watching her move walls and change windows and knew I had my begun to understand my character. Now, alas, it seems like Vinnie is lost in the archives.

Later today, I will go to the bank and see if possibly there are disks in my safe deposit [image error]box which, if I can read them, may give me the ending of book one.

All of this is a cautionary tale. Be careful about saving your files, moving them in updated form to your new computers, and especially careful about saving hard copies. Your office may end up looking like mine, but at least you’ll have the stories.

The Way We Talked

Dorothy Cannell: “Less is more.” I repeat this mantra to myself whenever I scoot around [image error]T.J. Maxx or Target pushing a cart that could hold a body with rigor mortis while besieged on all sides by displays of items any reasonable person could live without. But the moment I pick up a bottle of liquid soap to add to the fourteen already at home all further resolve vanishes, and I reach for a garden gnome.  I must know someone who likes them.  In hops a photograph frame and a couple of scented candles

I don’t think the “less” nugget of wisdom was around when I was young, but there were plenty of others including: “virtue is its own reward” with its similar appeal to self-denial.  Or other forms of worthiness.  I remember skipping rope to:

“Patience is a virtue,

Possess it if you can,

Found seldom in a woman,

And never in a man.”

Then there were all the sayings and expressions woven into adult conversations flowing around me.  I used to think my parents had made every one of them up.

Save your breath to cool you porridge.

Silence is golden.

Many a true word is spoken in jest.

Still waters run deep.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

Why have a dog and bark yourself?

Barking up the wrong tree.

Try a little elbow grease.

In for a penny in for a pound.

Be beholden to no one.

Grin and bear it.

Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.

I’m not going to roll over and play dead.

Tell the truth and shame the devil.

Cut your garment according to your cloth.

Show some gumption.

Many hands make light work.

Too many cooks spoil the broth (Can seem a contradiction).

There are none so deaf as those that will not hear.

Don’t toot your own horn.

When I was about nine our English teacher recited to us.

“Reach to the sky, and you’ll touch the top of the oak tree,

Reach for the top of the tree and you’ll grovel on the ground.”

So many warnings and admonitions:

Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.

Don’t give me those crocodile tears.

Don’t forget where you’ve come from.

I wonder if dependence on speaking the tried and therefore true came from an era anchored in the aftermath of two world wars, when order equaled security. Or was such language a vestige of the Victorian age?  I doubt young people rely on it.  But I’m grateful such phrases are ingrained in me.  So useful when writing dialogue in my books set in the nineteen thirties, providing a succinct point of view or an insight into character.  A person who lips bubble over with clichés is likely to be a bore, lacking in imagination, and possibly have something to hide.

I leave you with a question that floated around years ago:  “Would you rather be more foolish than you look?  Or look more foolish than you are?”

Happy reading,

Dorothy