Lea Wait's Blog, page 46

Weekend Update: November 25-26, 2023

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Maureen Milliken (Monday), Charlene D’Avanzo (Tuesday), John Clark (Thursday) and Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Friday).

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

The judges had a very hard time this year picking winners for our “Where Would You Put the Body” contest and wanted to pick all the submissions as winners. It was a fabulous crop of submissions.

Here are the Winners:

From Shelley Burbank:

with the following description (and excellent writing prompt):

In the attic of this creepy house in Farmington, Maine. I would make this an old sorority house from when UMF was Farmington State Teacher’s College in the 1960s. New owners buy the house to fix it up and turn it into a crime writers retreat center…and discover a body in the attic dressed in a moth-eaten sorority sweater. Who was this girl? Why was she murdered? Will the killer come out of “retirement” to stop the investigation?

From Jeff Cutler:

In among the ruins of Fort Popham in Phippsburg, ME. The loose rocks and crumbling facade would make it easy to stuff a body in a corner where only the young eagles (pictured) could pick at it until the bones are dry and brittle.

And from Louisette Castonguay:

Once heard of a Gangsta’ fixer who said he knew of places to “hide a car” in the Maine woods where no one would ever find the body. I’ve occasionally seen cars seemingly abandoned, since then, on little side roads, and thought of this.

Congrats to our winners. Please send your snail mail addy to writingaboutcrime@gmail.com to receive your prize.

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, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

Thanks and Giving by Matt Cost

What is Thanksgiving? The history dates to a feast shared between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people in 1621. As history is merely an interpretation of the past, the exact dates and how it all went down are all a bit vague. The spirit in which it is celebrated revolves around the first successful harvest after the first difficult winter for the Pilgrims that decimated their group of a hundred to merely fifty survivors.

The first national proclamation of Thanksgiving was issued by the Continental Congress in 1777 and was observed by General Washington to honor the defeat of the British at Saratoga. The observation of this day flittered around for another nearly hundred years until the mid-point of the Civil War when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that the final Thursday of November to be day of thanks and giving, replacing Evacuation Day, which had been a yearly celebration of the day the British left America following the Revolutionary War.

In 1939, President Roosevelt changed Thanksgiving to a week earlier in an attempt to give merchants a longer period of time to sell their goods before the Christmas Holidays and a few years later Congress ratified that it would be observed on the fourth Thursday of November. Twenty years ago, we changed it to the fourth FRIDAY in an effort to gather family together outside of other commitments.

Turkey has long been a Thanksgiving mainstay, but that like everything else, is fluid and adaptable to personal preference, taste, and attainability. In the book The Martian, Mark Watney celebrates very happily with potatoes, the first real food he has had in some time. The tradition, food, and spirit of Thanksgiving is relative to each individual and their reality of the moment.

Traditions of Thanksgiving are parades and football. The Macy’s Parade dates back to 1924 and football games have been a staple of this day since the inception of the National Football League. The president has received a turkey every year since 1873, mostly for marketing purposes. John F. Kennedy was the first president to pardon the turkey when he said he wasn’t going to eat the bird. George Bush made it official in 1989 and every president has followed suit since.

The spirit of Thanksgiving is what can be celebrated by all. I believe that the day holds a different meaning for all people. It can be a religious observance, a celebration of America, or simply a nod of thanks for the gifts we are bestowed and the ability to give to those less fortunate than ourselves.

For whatever it means to you, Happy Thanksgiving.

About the Author

Matt Cost was a history major at Trinity College. He owned a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym, before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. In 2014 he was released and began writing. And that’s what he does. He writes histories and mysteries.

Cost has published five books in the Mainely Mystery series, with the fifth, Mainely Wicked, just released in August of 2023. He has also published four books in the Clay Wolfe Trap series, with the fifth, Pirate Trap, due out in December of 2023.

For historical novels, Cost has published At Every Hazard and its sequel, Love in a Time of Hate, as well as I am Cuba. In April of 2023, Cost combined his love of histories and mysteries into a historical PI mystery set in 1923 Brooklyn, Velma Gone Awry. City Gone Askew will follow in April of 2024.

Cost now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. A chocolate Lab and a basset hound round out the mix. He now spends his days at the computer, writing.

Amateur Hour

In 1985, David Halberstam wrote a small lovely book called The Amateurs, chronicling the work and sacrifice of four American Olympic-class scullers. Given the subaqueous profile of their sport, none of these athletes had any prospect of extrinsic reward. Even Olympic medals are not real gold. The achievable end of their physical pain and dedication was exquisitely symbolic. So why did otherwise intelligent and ambitious people endure indifference, ignorance, daily pain, and all the markers of stalled –out personal and professional lives? For love.

Love, to love, amare, is the Latin root of amateur. And doing something for its own sake, not for profit or attention or glory of others, is the mark of a lover. An amateur craves the gift of the activity more than the outcome and the activity is somehow purified by the lack of reward. Amateurs do it, whatever they do, for the love.

I like my work, even the boring and tedious parts, and can lose myself in it with joy, but I’ve never enjoyed publicizing, selling, “branding” myself in the hope of more success. I’d rather spend the time being a writer than an author. Which leads me to suspect I might be an eternal amateur.

I come to the state honestly.

Mark Twain once said: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

From the time I established myself, my work and my passions, as separate from my father’s, I’ve appreciated the truth in that. But knowing how sons push back at what our fathers stand for, I’m surprised to see how much I resemble the man I pushed against so hard when I was a boy.

The year my parents marriage turned fifty, I took my father striped bass fishing off of Cape Cod. I knew he’d been to the Orvis School for fly-casting instruction the year before but I didn’t know how much had taken.

As I feared, watching the fly line whistle back and forth, a weighted Clouser once or twice conking our guide, he hadn’t learned much. But we were deep in a school of bass and I was too busy with my own gear to pay much attention to what was going on aft, except I was aware of the flailing and some mild curses, his, not the guide’s.

“Ha!” I heard finally and turned to look.

Terry, the guide, was helping him gingerly unhook a toothy but very small bluefish.

“Got the little bastard.”

“Emphasis on the little,” I jabbed.

But the beatific smile beneath his hat was enough to warm the cold windy ride back to Plymouth. He’d come to his fishing day without expectation of reward and been pleased. And that day I learned that being an eternal amateur was an honorable legacy, that not having to be an expert at everything meant not needing more and bigger successes every time.

If amateurism is rooted in love, it also springs from a passionate curiosity. One of my best friends built a national consulting business around athletic shoes: manufacture, styles and trends, financial and corporate analyses of the companies that make and sell them. It’s a serious business, even if it doesn’t sound like one – he’s been called the Sneaker King – and he’s the preeminent expert in his niche. He traveled a lot, found the work consuming and interesting, and it made him plenty of money.

So why, on Thursday afternoons, does he drive to a rickety white house on the edge of a university campus and broadcast a volunteer radio show presenting funk music? Passion – he may be an amateur in  the music and the radio ‘businesses,’ but he’s passionate about the music, curious about its history, its players, development.

I bring all this up because at eighty-six my father, the erstwhile fisherman, taught himself American Sign Language. For no particular reason – he didn’t want to stand up in front of his church and translate the service for members of his congregation. He hadn’t made new friends who were deaf. He wasn’t simply keeping himself busy: he had water aerobics, the food committee, the woodshop. He was doing it for the best of all reasons – he got curious about it.

As anyone who’s lived to eighty-six knows, curiosity doesn’t kill any cats – if anything, it feeds them. If anything, it’s certainty that kills things.

As a society, we revere specialty. We respect what appears to be a deep expertise in almost anything: business, financial, athletic, even romantic. But that kind of monomania requires certainty – you must always know you are on the right path, that nothing outside the path is interesting or can contribute to achieving your goals.

Curiosity is the dead opposite of certainty. It is the acknowledgement there are things we don’t already know that might be important, useful, or even just interesting. Curiosity is fed by that attitude of perpetual amateurism: what happens if I do it this way? Why is this like that? Why do we have to think this way?

Certainty takes things and people for granted. Curiosity is the daughter of doubt. We could use a little doubt, a little less certainty we know everything we need to know.

There is, after all, only one important certainty, that we die. When and what happens after, who knows? And who cares, really? And this thing we should be so certain of is the one thing we pretend will not happen to us. That itself is a strong enough argument against too much certainty.

So if we’re uncertain about what we ought to be certain of, maybe we also show too much certainty around things we cannot or should not pretend are knowable: relationships, politics, religion.

A politician is always a fat dumb easy target, but most politics is nothing more than certainty carried to a ridiculous degree, when even an individual’s positions can become mutually exclusive. Our politicians are certain evolution is a hoax, that old white men know best what women should do with their bodies, that homosexuality is an abomination (unless their son or daughter comes out).

All this certainty makes me yearn for a citizen legislature again, underpaid, supported by its own work outside the body. As messy and inefficient as it is – and I’ve seen the New Hampshire one at work, so I know – can our current governing bodies claim more success? Maybe amateurism can return some joy to the process – letting people with passion serve, the curious, the open-minded. Let’s bring back that perpetual amateur: in love with the work for its own sake, the process and the product, competent without being narrow, curious for what he or she knows and, most especially, does not.

Eat Well. Eat Cheap. Avoid Bloated Buns

Bucks Harbor (think One Morning in Maine)

Sandra Neily here: In late August I was treated to a three-night cruise on the windjammer the Angelique. There was much to rhapsodize about. (Thank you, Leslie!), but this is a post about food and avoiding disappointment, financial or otherwise.

I was warned the boat food would be amazing.

breakfast on deck

It was. And all cooked in two tiny, closet-like kitchens. I could smell the baking rolls, breads, and pastries by 6:30 each morning. A partial list of meals we ate helps explain my epiphany and my project.

Here goes: tarragon-curry chicken salad wraps with olive oil, lemon, chives, a touch of mayo, honey and pickled grapes and a crisp pink apple salad; breakfast, quiche made with lobster, Canadian bacon, and fruit salad; lunch on deck, freshly made fish chowder, green salad, and flaky biscuits. Dinner again, marinated steak tips with creamy garlic mashed potatoes, roasted squash and chocolate chip brownies for dessert.

On the cruise I had an epiphany when one of the women lying on the deck with me, asked, “When is the last time you had food this good?”

Here’s the last great meal memory that I shared. “Down a tiny ally in Quebec City when every road only had a small tunnel to walk between the banked snow. I think it cost at least $175 Canadian and that was forty years ago. All-you-can-eat mussels with a different sauce each time we cleaned a bowl of them. Delicate white fish with a piccata sauce, lemons grilled into the flesh. Fresh bread that literally melted in our mouths. Chocolate mousse I won’t try to describe. Think moans.”

But that memory was paid for by having a regular income. And sadly, that meal was decades ago.

So. Two things.

Bob and I don’t have regular incomes anymore. (And we’re getting shocked at the cost of fresh fruit and veggies. Not a good sign.) And I am soooooo done with reading about amazing Maine restaurants where, looking at the menu, I could perhaps afford two appetizers.

And two, when we do go out and try to eat affordably, the food makes me angry. Very angry. It’s often not worth $10, let alone $35 or more.

I feel increasingly ripped off. Bloated stale, cheap buns on small burgers; dinner salads with limp iceberg lettuce, unripe tomatoes, and a slab of unseasoned, mass-produced Sysco chicken tossed on it; rubbery baked potatoes that have aged badly in a warming bin.

My list of never-going-there-again eateries is getting longer and longer. Bob fears it will shrink to hot dogs from seasonal food carts.

I still read the wonderful restaurant reviews from all over the state, but know from the list of entrees, I’d be way over $100 for both of us to eat out.

Now to my current epiphany project: answering this question. “How might we eat out one or two times a month and spend less than $40-$45 per meal? Hopefully less than $35 per meal? Maybe a good goal would be $75 per month for two evenings out. The food has to be really, really good food. I could hope that it’s lovingly prepared, or just simply well prepared.  

Starting with this post I am going to offer up some reviews, menu suggestions, and even some figuring of the bill.  I hope colleagues and readers of this blog will send suggestions I can share.

Please send me your short reviews, using this one below as a template. Please always find something good to say. Add a line or two about something unique or worth knowing.

Here’s the format. I think we’ll just use first names.

*****

King Eiders, Damariscotta, Maine  (reviewed by Sandy)

The Good: The burgers are great: thick and cooked as one orders them, and the thick-cut, chewy yet somehow crisp fries taste like real potatoes cooked in mom’s oven. (Probably they aren’t, but they taste like it.)  My sister still raves about their deep bowls of appetizer mussels redolent with garlic and wine, but on our budget, that dish would be ordered as an entrée.

Needs Work or Don’t Order: Don’t order the swamped Caesar salad unless you ask for dressing on the side. (It will come from a bottle though.) If you want chicken with it, ask to have it come warm from the grill. Not cold from a fridge, perhaps suspiciously sourced from a Sysco truck. (More on Sysco at another time).

Good to Know: wonderfully, cozy atmosphere on a cold winter day. Reserve a booth. Choose off hours unless you like rubbing lots of joyful shoulders; they have a full-throated, really happy, Happy Hour. Bring a crowd and dive in maybe. When busy, the tiny, mid-room tables are like New York City dining that has you in your neighbors’ laps. (Good eavesdropping though.)

The Approximate Bill: With one shared burger and its generous pile of potatoes, plus a mussels appetizer ordered as an entrée and a thoughtful tip, King Eiders, while on the high-end for us, is still about $40-$45.

I’d be curious to hear reader suggestions! Again, here are the categories. The Good. Needs Work or Don’t Order. Good to Know. The Approximate Bill. Send to sdougn@gmail.com. Subject: Eat Well. Eat Cheap.

(Next month, I’ll share a truly affordable treat: Bakers Way in Boothbay Harbor. Paired with a King Eider’s outing, we’ll be close to or under $75 for two nights out.)

Sandy’s debut novel, “Deadly Trespass, A Mystery in Maine” won a national Mystery Writers of America award, was a finalist in the Women’s Fiction Writers Association “Rising Star” contest, and was a finalist for a Maine Literary Award. The second Mystery in Maine, “Deadly Turn,” was published in 2021. Her third “Deadly” is due out in next year. Find her novels at all Shermans Books (Maine) and on Amazon. Find more info on Sandy’s website.

 

The Job of an Opening Paragraph

Kate Flora: Last week, when a friend, Clea Simon, had to have surgery the week her book came out, eight of us got together to do a Zoom book launch for her. After we’d each read our assigned portion, we spent some time discussing the book. Not a difficult task, since Clea is a pro, even though a cozy about the Witch Cats of Cambridge wouldn’t normally be my cup of tea.

It was so interesting to get to talk about craft, and the many ways that a writer tells the reader about the book that’s coming. We talked about how the protagonist is introduced, through her own thoughts as well as through her observations about others. We talked about setting and how that is presented and how the author gives a sense of place through the details that are shared. It was fun to talk craft with seven other writers, some of whom I’d never met before. An hour of reading and fascinating conversation and To Conjure a Killer was launched.

The Joe Burgess series begins with Playing God

I woke up the next day still thinking about first paragraphs and the job they have to do for a book, and that pondering sent me back to my first Joe Burgess police procedural, Playing God. The books opens this way:

The small black dog skittered into the street, shining eyes registering canine astonishment that a vehicle dared to be out at this hour. Burgess stomped on the brakes, the Explorer responding with orgasmic ABS shudders, stopping just short of the beast. Four-wheel drive beating out four-foot traction. With a look Burgess decided to take as gratitude, the dog turned and trotted away. A good result. The cops waiting with the body wouldn’t have taken kindly to freezing their nuts off while their detective worked a dead dog scene.

 We may not always get it right, but that first paragraph, first page, first chapter has many jobs to do. Introduce the protagonist. Introduce the setting, Introduce the fact that the book is going to be about a murder. Perhaps share the time of year, the time of day, the narrator’s state of mind. Share something that will hook the reader on the story and compel them to read on to know what happens next or what the story is about.

Rereading that paragraph sent me to the bookshelf to see what I’d done in other books. Staring, of course, with my first published book, the first book in my Thea Kozak series, Chosen for Death.  Here’s how that book opens:

New England weather can be very unpredictable in September. Mornings that start off crisp and cold can be steaming hot by noon. That was how I found myself sitting in the sweltering church slowly baking in a jacket that I couldn’t take off. I couldn’t take it off because the matching dress was sleeveless and I’d been raised by a mother who knew to the depths of her soul that you couldn’t wear a sleeveless dress in church. Everyone else in the Boston area was spending that glorious Saturday outside. Not that I would have been. With the private school year just getting started, the consulting business I worked for had worked stacked up like planes at Logan Airport at five p.m. But I wasn’t at the beach or at work. I was at my sister Carrie’s funeral.

 First book. I didn’t know anything about the rules for a first paragraph or the importance of a hook, and yet there it was. Time of year, setting, the fact that the narrator has a demanding job, and the kicker: she’s at her sister’s funeral. Soon, she will find herself trying to solve her sister’s murder, and we will be following Thea Kozak as she does.

In my nonfiction books, I often have a lot of false starts before I find the right way to open, even though I know how the story will go. With Finding Amy, I jump right into the story:

It is every parent’s nightmare—your child goes out on Saturday night and vanishes off the face of the earth. It is also, sadly, something that happens far too often—a sensible and independent young woman who thinks she know how to take care of herself crosses paths with a predator. The bad guy doesn’t look evil. He is charming, charismatic, lively, and fun. It is only when he has his victim alone that his true self—his violent, explosive, self-indulgent, and remorseless side—emerges. Suddenly, a lifetime of striving toward maturity and self-awareness, of good decisions and generous acts, is changed by one bad choice. This is one of those stories.

 If I’ve done the job right, a reader will now need to know what happened and who the characters are.

The opening of The Angel of Knowlton Park is probably the darkest and most graphic of any that I’ve written. It was so troubling that when I was writing the book, I cut it out and tried a different opening several times. In the end, as books often seem to have their own truths and their own way that they want to be written, I came back to this, troubling as it is”

The fat, blue-black fly circled lazily in the July heat before landing in the child’s open eye. Burgess stifled his instinctive impulse to brush it away. He’d just started working this scene, and he wasn’t letting anything muck up his chances of learning everything it had to say about what had happened to this small dead boy.

 What do we know? That it’s July. It’s hot. A small boy had been killed, and the narrator is an experienced detective force to war between his protective instincts and his professional need to hold that back and observe the scene.

Part of a writer’s job, always, is to use all the available details to develop character and story, and here there’s an immediate insight into Joe Burgess—who he is and how he works—that will be developed throughout the story.

I could go on and on, of course, with so many books. And my small dive into some of them shows me that there are some I might open differently. But writing is a craft that is always learned and never mastered, and so I have more openings ahead where I will face the challenge of where and how the story begins.

 

Weekend Update: November 18-19, 2023

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Kate Flora (Monday), Sandra Neily (Tuesday), Dick Cass (Wednesday) and Matt Cost (Friday). Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

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

 Body Contest Results? Are, alas, delayed, but will post next week.

Kate Flora is thrilled that book 8 in her Joe Burgess police procedural series will debut in December.

John Clark has had several good things happen recently. One of his short stories was selected by the Principal Foundation for Money Chronicles: A Story initiative. Read on for more details here: https://short-edition.com/en/contest/principal-2023/finalists

In late October, one of his stories was featured on Mysteryrat’s Maze podcast. https://mysteryratsmaze.podbean.com/e/when-a-prank-goes-bad-by-john-r-clark/

His latest anthology Dark Maine is out and available at Amazon, or from the author

On a note unrelated to crime (we hope) don’t miss Gardens Aglow, the seasonal light display at the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden.

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, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

The Joys and Frustrations of Binge Rereading Series

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. One of retirement’s biggest advantages is finally having time to read (and reread) other people’s books. I tend to have three going at once—one on my iPad, one in print format, and one on audiocassettes (yes, still using a cassette player!) for listening while driving. At the moment, sprinkling in the occasional new title, I’m having a great time binge reading entire series I already own. Since most of these go back a ways, each one tends to have a healthy number of entries. I particularly enjoy seeing how the protagonist’s story develops from book to book . . . without having to wait a year for the next installment. In the best of all possible worlds, there IS a next installment to anticipate after I’ve reread all the ones that came before.

So, what have I been rereading? I finished all of C. H. Harris’s Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries a while back. I also recently reread Dana Stabenow’s Liam Campbell series, some in e-book and number three in an audio version. You have to love eBay for finding used audiocassettes, although which ones are available is pretty hit and miss. Then, after I reread all of Lindsey Davis’s Marcus Didius Falco series, alternating that with Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum capers, I’ve continued my visits to ancient Rome with Davis’s spinoff series featuring Falco’s daughter, Flavia Albia.

Are there drawbacks to rereading? A couple. Although I rarely remember who dunnit, I do occasionally recall bits of a plot. Fortunately, that doesn’t spoil the reread. In fact, there are a few books—comfort reads—where knowing what comes next has been something to look forward to. After all, at the end of a traditional mystery novel the bad guys are caught and the good guys win.

What does frustrate me are continuity errors. Reading back-to-back instead of once a year means those jump off the page and pull me out of the story. Sometimes it’s something that’s easy to overlook (for the author as well as the reader), but not when the author has said one thing in the last chapter of the previous book that is contradicted in the first chapter of the next one!

A related issue came up in recent Evanovich books. In addition to the main series, which has numbers in the titles, she wrote several other stories using Stephanie Plum. In at least one of them, there is a character who borders on having supernatural powers. The problem for me came when he started showing up in the numbered books, as if I, as a reader, should know who he was. I vaguely remembered hearing about him, but he stood out like a sore thumb in the non-woo-woo plots and could easily have been omitted from the stories. Frankly, having him there made me reconsider continuing to read the series. The newest, Dirty Thirty, is just out, but since I stopped at #27, I’m not sure when, or if, I’ll get around to it. I own #28 and #29 (I know I read them, although I’m drawing a blank on plots) and I really should reread them first. Or not.

Occasional “willing suspension of disbelief” is part of the deal writers and readers make with one another, and some writers make lemonade out of lemons by doing what I’ve heard called “hanging a lantern on” a contradictory or outrageous bit. Dana Stabenow has a character in her Liam Campbell series throw a book across the room after reading what is obviously the book in her Kate Shugak series in which Stabenow killed off Kate’s love interest.

These two series merged in Restless in the Grave (Kate #19), in which Liam and other regular characters from his books play major roles. By rights, it should be Liam #5, but that designation is given to Spoils of the Dead, which was published some years later. I started rereading it after #4, realized I was missing something, and spent way too much time searching online to figure out in which book both protagonists appeared. Hey—reading in chronological order is important!

One big advantage binge REreading has one over reading each title as it comes out is that it eliminates the frustration of the cliffhanger ending. I really hate these, especially the ones that are nothing more than a teaser for the next book—the one that won’t be out for an entire year! If there is a perfectly good, satisfying place to end the current book, then that last chapter setting up a future adventure should be separate and clearly labeled so readers like me don’t have to read it if they don’t want to.

Other kinds of cliffhangers, the ones that just stop short of telling you who is on the other side of the door (Evanovich), or whether a major character is going to live or die (Stabenow—twice!), are also annoying, but if the next book in the series is already at hand, at least I don’t end up tossing the book across the room.

 

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. 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. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new omnibus e-book editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.

 

Unscientific American

I was sitting at my computer the other rainy day when I heard a loud boom. The house  shook a little, and our power went out. Now, as one who has perfected the art of procrastination, I wasn’t too upset. Truth be told, my current manuscript was not even open. My plans for the morning involved numerous diversions from the realities of the grim world: the New York Times Wordle, Connections, Mini Crossword (I’m too stupid and impatient to do the regular one), and Spelling Bee, with a few rounds of Outspell from the Washington Post. These are the “exercises” I do daily for my brain, such as it is.

I’m not really stupid. (I am impatient though.) I skipped two grades in elementary school, graduated from high school at 15 and college at 19. However, somewhere along the line, my science skills suffered. Science credits were a requirement to get my bachelor’s degree from Adelphi University (and so was passing a mandatory swimming test, which is pretty bizarre in retrospect). So, I took a two-year survey course, AKA Science for Dummies: a semester each of watered-down Earth Science, Biology, Chemistry and Physics. I’ll never forget the physics professor standing at the blackboard laughing, saying there was no point trying to explain anything to us because we were too ignorant. He was right, if politically incorrect.

Back to 2023. No power? No problem. I could always write in longhand if absolutely necessary. (But probably couldn’t read what I wrote.) As I sat in the gloom, I tried to remember what it was like pre-computer. I have become totally dependent on it, but have no understanding of bytes and pixels or any other associated computer science words. In fact, I do not understand how most mechanical and electrical things work.

I took driver’s ed in the dark ages, when one had to identify the locations of pistons and spark plugs and batteries on a little map to qualify for the road test. Nowadays, everything is computerized, and whatever I “learned” then is obsolete. I passed, although I will drive for blocks to avoid parallel parking. Maybe even go back home.

Some years ago, I bought a research book to help me with early automobile history. I was writing a book set at the turn of the twentieth century, and the heroine had to learn how to operate a vehicle on the fly to save the hero’s life. Here is the German edition of In the Heart of the Highlander (A Scandal in Scotland auf Deutsch). See the cute car?

The research book was mercifully in English, but I still failed to comprehend how anyone could have learned how to drive. Each nascent car company had a completely different design from the others, and what complicated procedure worked on one would get you nowhere on another. The first car keys were used in 1910, but they only activated the electric circuit or locked the ignition. It wasn’t until 1920 that you could stop cranking the handle. And it wasn’t until 1949 that Chrysler first used the key ignition system we have today. Now, some cars don’t use keys at all. It’s difficult to keep up with advances in technology, and I’m not trying anymore. Ignorance is my bliss, just as that professor professed.

You will be happy to know the power came back on without us having to go full Little House on the Prairie. According to the CMP guys, the issue was “animal-related.” Life resumed—except for the squirrel who electrocuted itself when the transformer at the end of the street blew. No matter how advanced we become, there will always be a suicidal squirrel to remind us there’s more to life than staring at a computer screen.

Those rodents really have it in for the modern world—twice, my car’s wires were eaten by chipmunks. (If this ever happens to you, insurance should cover it, and strategically-placed mothballs seem to be a deterrent.) A mouse’s nest killed our air-conditioning system when we lived in Connecticut, and something chewed right through my son’s letterman jacket when it was stored in a box in a garage (with no mothballs).

Are you science-savvy? What do you do to procrastinate/keep your mind sharp and avoid the dreadful news headlines? Is it working?

www.maggierobinson.net

The Mystery of History by Kait Carson

I was born and raised in New Jersey. Growing up in the shadow of New York City was like having a ringside seat to history in the making. From ticker tape parades honoring astronauts to mounting the endless swirl of steps to the Crown of the Statue of Liberty, my dad made sure I missed nothing. He also made me study for each event and pass a test before I could attend. Cruelty? No. It gave me a thirst to know the backstory and understand the why. Not bad lessons for a future mystery writer.

The skills taught to a child flowed over into the adult. In 2005, my husband and I moved from the steamy, tropical, hurricane prone east coast of Florida to the Crown of Maine. He’d been a rocket scientist and his involvement with various missile programs had brought him to Limestone from time to time. He loved the area and wanted to return. I’d been to Maine as a nine-year-old camper. Don’t remember the name of the camp, but I remember the rocky shores and cold, cold water. I was also ready to leave my paralegal career behind and try my hand at becoming a full-time writer. If only it were that easy.

I set my first books in South Florida and the Florida Keys. Write what you know. It wasn’t until last year that I became comfortable setting anything more than a short story in the County. Short stories, by their very nature, require pinpoint precision. They are a moment in time, not an epic procession. Novels are a very different breed of cat. One that I’m not comfortable writing unless I can crawl into the story, pull it over my head, and experience it through the eyes of my protagonist. In short, a novel requires knee jerk knowledge. Part of that comes from a sense of history.

When we first moved to Aroostook County, the sign at the edge of Soldier Pond commemorating the bloodless Aroostook War of 1838-1839 intrigued me. Despite a history degree, the terms war and bloodless rarely went together. When I decided to write a novel set in The County, I knew I needed to know more. Not because I planned to feature the war, or even Soldier Pond, but because I set the story in the Allagash and the Maine/Canada border is a major player. Border wars, even bloodless ones, shape both an area and its population. Good natured teasing between residents on both sides of the border is commonplace. Most locals have relatives in both countries. Sometimes it seems the border is still in dispute.

The problems that gave rise to the Aroostook War began with the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. The treaty failed to determine the boundary between British North America and the United States. When Massachusetts began handing out land grants in what was then the District of Maine, boundary disputes followed. The Americans built a system of blockhouses along the disputed border. Of these, the one remaining original stands in Fort Kent. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty settled the dispute in 1842. The term bloodless is a misnomer. The War claimed thirty-eight non-combatant lives, most by accident or disease. Local lore holds that two of these casualties resulted from bear mauling.

Today the border runs along various rivers. In wooded areas, it’s determined by The Slash. A twenty-foot-wide clear-cut area between the two countries. The modern-day Slash figures in my latest work in progress, the Aroostook War does not. The book is contemporary, not historical. Knowing the history gave me background to understand the subtilties of the setting and my protagonist.

Reader and writers, do you find a touch of history adds to your enjoyment of a setting and a story?

Which as a Jersey girl I know is located in New Jersey.

Scenes from the New England Crime Bake

Kate Flora: Twenty-two years ago, a regional mystery conference featuring New England writers was born in my living room when I said I thought we ought to have our own conference and the presidents for Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime immediately agreed to work together to plan one. Since then, every Veteran’s Day weekend, writers and readers descend on a hotel somewhere near Boston. The conference is always different–different themes, different players–but always wonderful. Surprising as it is, crime writers are an extremely nice and generous bunch, appropriately calling ourselves a community.

This year’s Guest of Honor was Deborah Crombie, a Texan who writes English police procedurals, and so the theme was very English, including a banquet where prizes were given for the best fascinator and the best cravat.

Here are some random scenes from the weekend, including Ruth McCarty wearing her Lifetime Achievement Award tiara. The event always concludes on Sunday with some forensics. This year: Junk Science, the Innocence Project, and what a private investigator really does. AND there was a chocolate party.

Kate, Maureen & Jule at the Sunday breakfast

Vintage Kate done up for the banquet

Photos from Diane Kenty:

An author panel

The Jungle Red Writers Blog Group hold forth

Our own Maureen Milliken

Brenda Buchanan with Conference co-chair Connie Hambley

M. Chris Fabricant from the Innocence Project

Ruth McCarty with her tiara

Kate Flora with Luci Zahray, the Poison Lady

The chocolate party: