Lea Wait's Blog, page 295

Patience and Hard Work Beat a Punch to the Head

By Al Lamanda

Before I became old and wise, I was an impatient and brash young man. (Yes, it’s true, I was once young, and no, Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t in The White House at the time.) I was fresh out of the service and I wanted to make up for lost time, so I was in one big hurry. I had done some boxing in the service and was pretty good in the amateur ranks. Back home in New York, I thought about turning pro. I sought the services of a professional trainer. I met with a young man at the gym who I thought was the trainer. It turned out that he was the assistant to the trainer, a man named Robert, who was sixty-seven-years-old at the time. I told Robert I had done a fair amount of boxing in the service and was thinking of making it a career. Robert told me that if I had the tools to turn pro, he demanded a two-year commitment to training before I could step into the ring. Two years? That was an eternity and I didn’t have the time or the patience to waste on two whole years. Robert showed me otherwise. He invited me into the ring to spar with him to see, as he put it, what I didn’t know. Besides being forty-four-years younger than Robert, I had about seventy pounds on him. None of that mattered as Robert had decades of experience at perfecting his craft and in the end, I had lumps. From that experience with Robert, I learned the art of patience and self-discipline. We remained friends and student and teacher for many years.

Flash-forward some forty years and it seems that every young writer I talk to these days is in one big hurry. I spoke with a group recently at an event and they wanted to know the secret to being a successful author. I told them that there are no secrets and that most successful authors have these things in common: Hard Work. Dedication. Patience. A thick skin. A great imagination. The ability to take rejection and criticism without it resulting in an apoplectic meltdown. The intelligence to understand that constructive criticism and an editor can actually make your work better. The ability to not over-write your story. (Some stories want to end at 65,000 words, so don’t try to make them 80,000. Ever watch a movie that seems about twenty minutes too long, same thing.) The knowledge that you don’t know it all (and in fact, like most of us you know hardly anything at all.) Skill at telling a story. Skill at polishing your story. Did I mention patience? And, of course, a great deal of luck.

My audience looked at me as if I had just recited the formula for nuclear fusion and said there was a pop quiz. You see, the average age of the audience I was speaking to was younger than the belt I was wearing (I tend to hang onto things that work for me) and they are the product of what I call the instant gratification generation, or IGG for short. They have been weaned on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Cell Phones, Skype (I have no idea what that is) Text Messages, High-Speed Internet, Movies and Music Streaming, Whosay, LinkedIn, Pinterest (Good luck with that one) IPads that do everything except make coffee, and all work in the blink of an eye. If something takes more than thirty seconds to work, panic and anger set in, and God forbid you’re away from your phone for more than a minute or two. This past Christmas dinner, there were two groups in attendance. Us old people who actually held conversations, laughed and told stories, and the IGG’s who sat sullenly in a corner and didn’t say a word as they stared at their phones as if hypnotized by Dracula.

So it came as no surprise that my audience was expecting some kind of magic formula to instant success. One young woman asked me if I knew any shortcuts to writing a great story and getting it published.

I told her if she wanted shortcuts to buy instant rice and one-minute oatmeal instead of regular, because when it comes to being a writer, there are no shortcuts. There is, however, luck, and maybe you might be the lucky one that lightning strikes when you are twenty-four, but the odds are about the same as six winning numbers. So replace luck with hard work and the odds will be in your favor.

Another IGG, a male, asked why it was so difficult to land an agent. He said that he sent out hundreds of query letters to agents and didn’t get a single reply. I asked him what the genre of his book was. He said, and I’m not making this up folks, that he actually hadn’t written a book yet, but wanted an agent for when he does. He said, and I could barely keep a straight face, that he sent a selfie along with his query. (Wouldn’t you just love to be the agent that received his email?)

An IGG male in the back stood up and asked me the following question: Why is it so hard to write? I told him it isn’t hard at all, it’s just hard to write really well. Which brought me back to what successful authors have in common. At which point, most of the group were staring at their phones and tap-tap-tapping away.

I’d lost my audience because I was telling them things they did not want to hear–that even in this age of instant everything, when it comes to writing and telling a great story there just are no shortcuts and substitutes for hard work and dedication. You have to love the art of writing and you have to write often to perfect your craft. You have to be willing to take your lumps and ride the roller coaster of rejection and rewrites until, one day, it’s your turn.

And when your turn comes, you still need the patience and discipline to work with agents, editors and publishers, because you will be put to the test. So learn those qualities now and they will not fail you now and later on down the road.

And hopefully, along the way, no one will have to punch you in the head for you to learn these lessons.

 

Al Lamanda is the author of the Edgar Award nominated mystery novel Sunset. He latest mystery, This Side of Midnight, will be released in June 2015.

 

 

WHO SAYS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS CAN’T WRITE?

Vaughn Hardacker here: I wanted to start 2015 off on an uplifting note. I came across this list on Snopes.com (http://www.snopes.com/humor/lists/met...) and felt it was my God-appointed duty to pass it on to the world.

Actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E.coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

26. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

27. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

28. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

Here is our challenge. During the coming year we all have to come up with an analogy more hilarious and innovative than #14.

Here’s my first entry: Her blind date looked like something she found on the bottom of her shoe after walking across the cow pasture.

Well, it is a first draft! I’ll do better with the rewrite.

Toward Unconscious Competence?

Hi. Barb here, still in sunny Key West. (Don’t hate me.)

I’m in the muddle in the middle of the first draft of my next Maine Clambake Mystery, Fogged Inn. And my general muddle at this point has me pondering the notion of Unconscious Competence.

We’ve all seen this model for mastering a skill, right?

The theory was developed at the Gordon Training International in the 1970s, but it’s become pretty much a part of everyday culture since.

Unconscious Incompetence: The idea is before you begin to acquire a skill, you don’t know anything about it, including what you don’t know. All of us have met fiction “writers” at this stage of development. Usually they are armchair authors who do not actually write, but whose reaction to most things they read is, “I could do way better than this.”

Conscious Incompetence: But once you start writing fiction, you realize, “Man, this is hard.” I mean really hard, because fiction-writing includes so many layers and the use of many, many skills. There are story-telling skills: structure, timelines, logic (repeat for plot and every subplot). There are character development skills: background, personality, emotion, motivation, arc (repeat for just about every named character). There are the the narrative skills: developing theme, pacing, symbolism. And there are the prose skills, choosing the words needed to convey all of the above, (repeat for every chapter, scene, paragraph, sentence and word). It’s a lot to keep track of.

Conscious Competence: So, the hapless writer decides to acquire some skills. Whether he takes classes, or reads how-to books, or analyzes the books of his betters, or seeks out good critiquers and editors, or most likely all of the above, becoming a conscious competent certainly involves writing, writing, writing. And writing a lot of crap that eventually gets better.

Unconscious Competence: Unconscious competence comes when you’ve so internalized a skill, you can do it without thinking. Like riding a bike or driving or, well, fill in your own blank. Everyone has skills like this.

But lately I’ve begun to wonder, “Do writers ever reach the level of Unconscious Competence?” Most writers I know, even the best ones, are piles of quivering self-doubt. And that’s on a good day. They all wonder when they start a new book, Will this be the time it doesn’t work? When they are in the muddle in the middle, they wonder, Is this the time it will be unfixable? And sometimes, even for really experienced writers, it is that time, and they have to throw it all out and start over.

I myself have been hanging out at the junction of Conscious Incompetence and Conscious Competence for years. I’m a little weary of it, to tell the truth.

I have hope. There are a few little aspects of the job I have knocked and feel confident about. But the bulk of it…oy.

Sometimes I think Unconscious Competence shouldn’t be a goal in the arts–because there lies formula, repetition, the worst kind of hackery. But then I watch fine artists and musicians and others whose confidence in their baseline skills gives them the ability to soar.

And I return to wanting, hoping, practicing and honing..

Want a Scary Day Job?

Vicki Doudera here.  I’m traveling this week and so am recycling a column from three years ago about my double life.  Enjoy!

Last week I was telling a woman about my murder mystery series, and she shivered and asked me how I slept at night after imagining such spooky scenarios. The truth of it is, penning fiction at my comfy desk with the wood stove crackling away isn’t frightening – not like my “day” job, the profession I entered nine years ago as a way to counter the isolation imposed by writing.

I’m an agent. Not a secret agent, special agent, double agent, or FBI agent… I’m a real estate agent.  Not creepy enough for you?  Just read on.

Take the obvious first: safety. There don’t appear to be any real solid statistics on the number of agents who fall victim to murder, rape, assault, or robbery, but practicing real estate almost by definition puts us in potentially hazardous situations. Agents often meet customers for the first time in front of a vacant house, or drive or ride with them to an appointment. It is not uncommon for an agent to be alone in the office late at night, finalizing an offer or catching up on paperwork, and some agents still go door to door “prospecting,” or looking for listings.

My second Darby mystery, KILLER LISTING, begins with the murder of a real estate agent at her own open house. Sadly, this scenario isn’t wholly fictitious. The real-life murder in 2006 of Sarah Ann Walker in McKinney, Texas, was definitely in my mind while I was writing. Ms. Walker was presiding over an open house at a new housing development when she was stabbed 27 times. More recently, real estate agent Ashley Okland was shot to death last April while holding an open house in West Des Moines, Iowa. No arrests have been made in the case.

I try to take precautions when I meet a stranger at a property, either bringing along another agent or my big and bearded husband. (I used to take my chocolate lab, but now that my canine companion is a toy spaniel, that option’s out.) I lock the office door if I’m alone at night and try not to share too much personal information on-line. My series protagonist, Darby Farr, is even better. She carries pepper spray and knows Aikido. Like me, she’s had some frightening experiences while on the job.

I once worked with a white-haired, elderly man who turned out to be a very capable con artist with a rap sheet as long as your arm; I spent months emailing back and forth with an eager Japanese doctor later revealed as a total fake; and showed the listing of a man further up the coast who subsequently threw his wife in a dumpster. (She survived. Let’s hope they divorced.) I’ve encountered sellers who hoard garbage and others who hoard cats. I’ve been asked to give a value for a customer’s dazzling waterfront estate and then seen his photo in the paper a month later as he’s led off to prison for scamming millions of dollars from investors in his phony insurance company.

I’ve known desperate sellers, greedy buyers, and agents who are both.

Houses themselves can be creepy. Some are soul-less shells; others so scarily organized they scream Stepford. One of my listings contained a hidden “Armageddon Room” stocked with provisions for the end of the world; another, a basement brimming with porn.  Some places are stigmatized properties, where murders, suicides, or other tragedies have occurred. A few contain strange odors, dead vermin, or unidentifiable suspicious stains. I once kicked something in a garage drain that looked like a miniature “Creature from the Black Lagoon” yet managed to continue flawlessly with my spiel describing the house.

There are frightening house-eating fungi that lurk out of sight, such as poria incrassata, a mold that lives in dank cavities and makes mummified skin out of studs. There are blatant examples of greed unearthed in old deeds, a scenario I wrote about in A HOUSE TO DIE FOR. There are so-called “spite” wells that are placed near property lines to prevent someone else from building. The list goes on and on.

One of the oddest things to cross my path happened only a few months ago at a new listing our office viewed. The owner, a kindly man in his 70’s, showed us the snapping turtle he’s tended for 37 years in a plastic kiddie pool in his basement. He’s periodically provided his “pet” with other turtle playmates, but, he told us with a wink, they always end up eaten.

Despite the inherent dangers, stress, and the ever-shifting housing market, I enjoy real estate. The money I earn allows me to splurge on writing conferences; the hours give me flexibility to write; and the camaraderie keeps me sane and connected. I’ve found that I use my time more efficiently when I’m busy, and I enjoy transitioning from my public persona as Realtor to private role as author, and vice versa. Even with the oddballs, I have many, many delightful clients.

Real estate is my current profession, while writing is my career. I feel very fortunate that the two overlap in the Darby Farr Mystery Series, and that I’m able to put the wackiest of situations (watch for that turtle…) to good use.

Weekend Update: January 24-25, 2015

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Vicki Doudera (Monday), Barb Ross (Tuesday), Vaughn Hardacker (Wednesday), and Kate Flora (Friday) with a special guest on Thursday.

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

Lea Wait:  Saturday January 24 at 10:30 a.m. Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett and I will be talking about mysteries at the Ellsworth Library on State Street in Ellsworth, Maine. We’ll have copies of our books available for purchase and signing. Addenda from Kathy/Kaitlyn: There’s a chance the weather may force us to postpone. If so, I’ll add another update to that effect. If you’re reading this after 7AM Saturday, all’s well and we’ll see you there!

And January 28th I’ll be visiting several fourth grade classes in Kensington, New Hampshire … via Skype!

Don’t forget that if your reading group or class or library isn’t close to Maine, but would like one of us to “visit” – Skype is always a possibility!

 

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. Don’t forget that comments are entered for a chance to win our wonderful basket of books and the very special moose and lobster cookie cutters.

 

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: mailto: kateflora@gmail.com

 

Marketing and Competitive Reseach Before You Write? Oh, Yes.

Lea Wait, here. Many of you know that my new mystery series (Mainely Needlepoint) has just debuted with TWISTED THREADS. Traditional publishing being what it is, I’ve already finished the second book in the series(THREADS OF EVIDENCE), which is in the middle of copy edits. THREAD AND GONE, the third manuscript, is due the first of March. Writing (and publishing) are challenges .. one of the largest of which is keeping ahead of readers!

Many people have asked me “why needlepoint?” As some asked last spring, when UNCERTAIN GLORY, my most recent historical (set during the first two weeks of the Civil War) was published, “How did you choose that time period?”

The answer to both questions is “competitive research and marketing.” Although the idea of sitting down and writing what is in your heart (or mind) sounds wonderful, in truth, writing without research can lead a writer down a path to manuscript rejection.

So … what kind of research would you do for a book that isn’t even written?

Publishers want to know what the competition for your books will be, and how many people will be interested in buying it. A growing number of publishers (like mine) want to see the numbers before they sign onto a new book, or series.

But, don’t panic. Sometimes the research is relatively simple.

My publisher for UNCERTAIN GLORY was enticed by the Civil War timing of the book — even though the book was set in Maine, far from the 1861 front. Reason? The book would be published during the 150th anniversary of the war, when people would be thinking about 1861-1864. It’s a period covered in most schools in grades 4-8 … the right age for young readers, and for teachers and librarians to add to their collections. (I’d written an earlier version of UNCERTAIN GLORY set in 1859. It didn’t sell. The Civil War connection made the difference.)

Three of the book’s major characters are boys. (Conventional wisdom says few boys will read a book with a girl as a major character; girls will read books about boys or girls.)

I’d also checked the title. UNCERTAIN GLORY is taken from Shakespeare (“the uncertain glory of an April day”) and it had only been used as a title for an early Errol Flynn movie. Although titles can’t be copyrighted … it’s not great to have a dozen books in print with the same one. I also included an annotated list of other books for young people set during this period, and why UNCERTAIN GLORY would be different.

OK. That all sounds good for an historical – especially one for young people. But what about a mystery? How would you do market research for one of those?

Funny you should ask. Because the publisher of my Mainely Needlepoint series wanted competitive analysis/market research done as part of my proposal. (Yes, they also wanted summaries of the first three books in the series and about fifty pages of the first book and the reasons why I would be the best person to write the series.)  I believe my market research tipped the scale in my favor.

I wanted to write a traditional, cozy, mystery series with a little edge. I knew cozies with “craft” backgrounds were popular, so I looked at what was already being published. I wouldn’t have wanted to suggest, say, a series with a background of beading, to a publisher that already had one. Or a series about quilt shops when there were already several being published.

How did I find out who was publishing what, and how successful they were? The answers were simple to find. We’re lucky today to have Amazon and BN.com. Search for “beading mysteries” on those sites and you’ll have a good start on research. In my case I found one other needlepoint series, an embroidery series, a machine embroidery series, and five knitting or crochet series, which I included in my analysis since I suspected they shared some of the same readers.

I then looked to see how many books were in each series; whether the series was still being published; what their publishers were; and whether they were mass market originals, hard cover originals, or trade paper originals.

After reading one or two books in each current successful series it was clear that needlepoint would be a good topic: of the three series featuring embroidery, even the one listed as a Needlecraft Mystery included other forms of stitchery.

But I wanted my series to stand out. All the craft mysteries I’d looked at were set in embroidery/needlecraft/yarn shops, and all but one of the protagonists owned such a shop. I looked at geographic locations, too:  only one series was set in New England.

I decided to set my series in Maine (a plus because many readers know me as a Maine author,) to have my series connected to a custom needlepoint business run by a young woman with a past and by her grandmother … allowing for plots involving people of different ages. And since my earlier series was set in the antiques world, I decided that my Mainely Needlepoint series would build on that, and my needlepointers would also identify and restore antique needlepoint. (More story ideas …)

But how many readers were interested in needlepoint? A little googling told me. Needlepoint is a popular craft, especially among middle-aged and older women … and men. Women over forty are also the largest readers of traditional mysteries. But — I still needed numbers. Publishers want numbers.

The American Needlepoint Guild has 164 chapters, 9500 members, an on-line presence and a bimonthly magazine. The National Needle Arts Association is the professional organization connecting the 873 retail shops and 256 wholesalers of crafts/yarn. Two magazines and several national conventions each year reach needlepointers. Needlepoint is also popular in the UK and in Canada.

Result of that research? A three-book contract, and suggestions of several specific ways to reach readers who might be interested in a needlepoint series. My agent told me he liked the marketing plan so much, if it hadn’t sold to one publisher, he was prepared to market it to other editors. (Note: he didn’t mention the plots of the first three books in the series, or my writing style.)

It took me about two weeks to research and write the proposal for the series. And not only did it help my editor make a decision, it also helped me develop the background for the series, and its characters.

Right now I’m busy promoting TWISTED THREADS, and writing the third in the series. THREADS OF EVIDENCE, the second in the series, will be published in August of this year.

I’m not focusing on writing another series: two is plenty for now! But I do have several other ideas. And, before those ideas get too far along, I’ll be doing some market research. It just makes business sense.

 

 

 

 

 

“Slum and Blight”

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, pondering the fact that residents of the same village that was listed as fourth among the ten prettiest in central Maine in a Kennebec Journal feature in 2012, recently voted to accept the designation “slum and blight” because it was the only way to qualify for Community Development Block Grant funding—much needed federal funds to improve the infrastructure of the downtown area.

Say what?

Blame the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for this one, folks. They are the ones who changed the way they calculate the percentage of low and moderate income households in a given town, thereby making Wilton, Maine, which had previously been eligible for funds, ineligible unless they were willing to admit to this less-than-pleasant-sounding description. Same place. Same conditions. Under the old method, using figures from the U. S. Census, Wilton qualified. Under the new system, using something called the American Community Survey, the town fell short of eligibility by two percent. Only 49% of our population was considered to have low or moderate income when we needed to hit 51% to qualify for help. Left with a choice between conducting an income survey, something that would be both time-consuming and expensive, and voting at a special town meeting to declare a specific section of town a “slum and blight,” there wasn’t really much choice about what to do.

There’s no question that there are things that need fixing—vacant buildings, aging street lights and sidewalks, a particularly uneven stretch of road I drive over every day to get to the post office—but my downtown is a slum? Was it really necessary to go that far?

Apparently, it was. The special town meeting was duly called. No, I didn’t attend. My bad. Then again, in a town with a population of 4,116 in 2010 (down eight from the population in 2000), only thirty-five people did show up. Like most of the rest of Wilton’s residents, I read about the meeting in the next day’s online Daily Bulldog.

Here’s the fact that swayed those attending to approve the new designation: using the same income standards as the current “slum and blight” description requires, the town applied for an earlier federal grant back in 1988. At that time, they received $500,000, which was used to build a new parking lot, update street lights, tear down several dilapidated buildings and do paving work. Infrastructure improvements aren’t cheap. Ask the state government for help? Forget it! Not under this administration. Private funding? We don’t have any millionaires living in Wilton anymore. Heck, we don’t even have any industry. Once upon a time, Wilton was the home of Bass Shoe (Weejuns), Forster Manufacturing (toothpicks and clothes pins), and a thriving tannery. The former shoe factory on Main Street has taken on new life and now houses a restaurant, businesses, and apartments, but elsewhere we have industrial waste and abandoned factory buildings to deal with.

All things considered, there was really no question about how the vote would go. The downtown area, all the way from Wilson Lake along Main Street to the Academy Hill School and then down Depot Street to U. S. Rt. 2 is now officially a “slum and blight.”

I’m pleased that Wilton qualifies for federal assistance but I can’t help but wonder what hoops small rural towns will be made to jump through next. I have a good imagination. The possibilities boggle the mind.

Remembering to See

Kate Flora here, on a topic I revisit on the blog at least once a year–the importance of refilling the well of creativity and remembering to pay attention to the world around me. Right now, I’m enjoying my annual escape to San Francisco. From a window atop Russian Hill, I can watch the morning fog swallow up the city below me, eat the Bay Bridge and the Transamerica building and then spit them out again. I have a rhythm to the days–work in the morning, walk in the afternoon, see friends in the evening. All of these events remind me to be aware, to notice, to think about what I’m seeing through new lenses. The lens of me on vacation. The lens of me as a reader, remembering what things I admire in the works of other writers–how vivid description or the careful rendering of a small detail can make a whole scene come alive. The lenses of my characters, who see the world differently from me. Burgess, whose mother make him an observer; Thea who orders her world through language.

These observations span a wide range, from the macro–fog engulfing the city, to the micro–the way a strange shape dropped from a tree onto the ground can become poetry. What are the textures of the tree bark? What does the trunk of a tree fern look like? How can a single while calla lily stand out in a mass of hot pink camellias?

I’m a country mouse, so there is also the world of sound. The almost silent electric cars that creep up. The masses of green parrots holding forth in the trees across the street, almost unseen when I look up until I realize those aren’t red flowers but red beaks. A cackling mass of blackbirds swirling and looping above downtown at dusk, forming and reforming and changing direction like precision pilots, so perfectly in symmetry as they swoop above the workers heading home that I expect any moment they’ll start skywriting and sending us messages from bird world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And of course, because the people we visit with are readers, my phone is filled with photos of things I want to remember, books I have to pick up and read, the names of contacts, and ideas for workshops, writing, and things to follow up on.

This visit reminds me that I can do the same thing at home. There is a world there to be observed as well. It’s just that sometimes I need to leave my desk to come back to it, renewed, refreshed, and ready to settle back into my obsession, my pleasure, my life–storytelling. Only now I hope I can remember to look out those windows, walk those yards and woods, stare out at the seabirds and stop and pay attention to the hawks and robins.

 

And finally, because one of the things I’ve talked about here in San Francisco is storytelling, I urge you to watch this short TED talk by Andrew Stanton:

 

 

 

MYSTERY OR SUSPENSE?

Susan Vaughan here. Although I’m working on shifting my genre into the mystery arena, I’ve been published in romantic suspense for a long time. When I tell non-romance readers what I write, they look at me blankly. I usually keep the explanation simple that I write romance interwoven with a mystery, and I don’t distinguish between mystery and suspense. Understanding that difference has come up in a couple of my online email groups, so I thought this might be a good time to address it here for readers. There’s certain blending and crossover, but here’s my take on the general difference.

A mystery begins with the crime, usually a murder, and the remainder of the book involves a sleuth, either police or a PI or a citizen with personal reasons for getting involved, trying to identify and apprehend the murderer.

Barbara Ross’s mystery CLAMMED UP features an amateur sleuth whose search for the murderer is tied to her need to save her family’s clambake business.

In AND GOD GRANT YOU PEACE, Kate Flora continues her police-procedural mystery series with Portland Detective Joe Burgess as the sleuth.

A suspense novel, whether romantic or not, involves the hero (protagonist) who may be a federal agent or a police detective or an extraordinary citizen (Think Jack Reacher.), trying to stop the villain (the antagonist) from carrying out his dastardly scheme. Sometimes there are additional crimes/murders as well, and more often than not, the sleuth is in danger at the end when confronting the killer. In a suspense novel, both the hero and the reader might know the villain’s identity. The tension and “suspense” come from the rising action, often a time factor, and from keeping the reader wondering if the villain can be stopped.

My book TWICE A TARGET has elements of both but is primarily a mystery. Holt believes the car crash that killed his brother and his brother’s wife was murder and enlists the help of the heroine, Maddy, a woman he doesn’t trust (old baggage I won’t go into), to help him learn the motive for the attack and identify the killer.

Another of my books, PRIMAL OBSESSION, is more obviously (romantic) suspense. Sam, a Maine Guide, and Annie, an investigative reporter and one of the canoeists on his wilderness trip, discover that the serial killer Annie was writing about has followed her into the woods. To save her life and the lives of others, they must evade him and eventually try to capture him.

Whether mystery or suspense or thriller, readers have more flavors to choose from than vanilla and chocolate.

*** The ebook of TWICE A TARGET is only 99 cents Jan. 20-24 on Amazon, http://amzn.to/11rQpDk. You can find more information about my books at www.susanvaughan.com.

Bullet Points

We had a burst of winter here in Eastport, snow all day and plows rumbling by outside. It’s a different place now from the one summer visitors experience, and in its way just as lovely. You can’t see him but there’s a guy on the tugboat, shoveling off the deck.

Since I took these pictures yesterday the temperature has risen to 48 degrees. Just to soften us up for the deep freeze forecast for next week, do you suppose?

 

I have been in the throes of rewrite, coming now and then upon passages whose original appeal just escapes me entirely. That’s when I spend Way Too Much Time on a few lines, trying to wrestle them into something…well, if not graceful, at least halfway tolerable. It’s also when I try to remember an old tip that I learned after lots of struggle: if nothing works, if the thing just won’t be word-wrangled, give a bit of thought to: (1) Deleting it entirely, or (2) rethinking the event the passage describes. Often I find deleting is the correct move.

 

I’m reading NO ORDINARY TIME by Doris Kearns Goodwin, about FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt and WWII. The people are all fascinating and the prose feels effortless. It’s what my old friends in the science fiction world called window-pane prose…you don’t see it, you see through it to the world being depicted.

 

Speaking of prose…do you have someone you read when you need to get your mojo back, or you feel that you do? My favorite is Dickens, and especially the multi-point-of-view BLEAK HOUSE, just because he does handle point of view so well, and because the prose sounds like someone specific, someone with quirks and traits and opinions.

Which is another way of saying how well he does point of view, isn’t it?

 

Eastport has sidewalks and streetlamps and public art, city features that make downtown’s relative emptiness in winter all the more striking. The atmosphere is one of knuckling down, doing the necessary, and keeping warm — not bad ideas when you have a novel in progress, hmm?

And about the time it’s done (she said hopefully), spring will be here. The seed catalogues are spread out on the kitchen table in bright profusion. I’ve discovered that potatoes keep well in the butler’s pantry, and that I miss garlic when I don’t grow it, and there’s a zucchini relish recipe to try. So: something to work on now, something to look forward to later…life is good.

Note: This is a rerun of a post from last year — because just like last year at this time I’m hip-deep in rewrite. The more things change, etc. See you next time!