Lea Wait's Blog, page 58

Print or E-Book? (and a giveaway)

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here with a question for readers of this blog. No, I’m not going to ask you which you prefer, print copies or e-books. Not in general, anyway. My query has to do with only one type of book—nonfiction, specifically reference books.

I gather you can make notes in an e-book, but for many people a print copy with post-it notes sticking out and parts highlighted in blinding yellow and handwritten notes in the margins, is still the only way to go. I have written nonfiction as well as fiction and two of those books, How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and The Writer’s Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England from 1485-1649 are reference books for writers. Both are out of print in all but e-book editions, and in the case of the latter, written as part of the Writer’s Digest Everyday Life series, the e-book is not much more than a pdf file. It was produced for the e-book market way back in 2004—eons ago in tech terms. Officially priced at $10, most online sellers offer it for less—as low as $4.99—and it has sold at least a few copies every month since it was issued.

How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries: The Art and Adventure of Sleuthing Through the Past won the 2008 Agatha Award for mystery nonfiction and has been available in a trade paperback edition until last year when Perseverance Press, the publisher, closed its doors. I made a few updates (the marketing section, obviously, was completely out of date) and issued a new e-book edition last year. I thought about also self-publishing a print-on-demand paperback version but put that on hold. After all, there were still plenty of copies of the Perseverance paperback floating around. Now I’ve started thinking about it again. As for the e-book, which sells for $4.99, it has had some bumps. There is no Kindle edition because Amazon bots deemed it was available elsewhere for free. Where? I have no idea, but they say their decision is final. B&N, Apple, Kobo, and others are not so short-sighted. A print edition would be listed on Amazon, although Amazon would probably (based on my previous experiences) make it as difficult as possible to actually order a copy.

Anyhoo, I could do print-on-demand trade paperback editions of both these books that could be ordered online or through any bookstore or library or direct from me. I probably will, but I have other reprint projects in the works. I have to wonder if that many people really care if they have a reference book in a paperback edition.

Producing a print-on-demand version of either book wouldn’t be all that difficult. I’ll have to proofread the text again, but there shouldn’t be much that needs changing. Formatting is fairly simple thanks to the company (Draft2Digital) I use to produce my self-published books. They provide ISBNs and generate a table of contents. I just have to be consistent about spacing, font size, and so on in the text. Nitpicky stuff. It can be time-consuming, though. The templates are great but they are set up for fiction and tend to indent in the wrong places or start new pages where you don’t want them to. It usually takes me several tries, making corrections in the manuscript and resending it, before everything comes out looking the way it should.

I already have a front cover for the e-book of the How To, so all I need is the copy for the back cover. However, I will need an entirely new cover for the Writer’s Guide and will need to update the frontmatter, including adding an author note.

I was considering all those things and thinking This won’t be too hard when I remembered something. E-books are searchable. Print books are not. Each of these books originally had an index. The entries can be reused but the page numbers will no longer match. After everything else is good to go, I’m going to have to go through every dratted index entry, find the correct page numbers, insert them in the manuscript, resend it, and hope the spacing looks right when I’m done.

Good grief.

I need to do it right, too, because by the time I add in production costs per book and the cut Draft2Digital gets (both non-negotiable), these paperbacks will have to be priced almost as high as if they were traditionally published. Probably $15.99—so as much as triple what the e-book would set a buyer back.

The templates aren’t fond of bibliographies, either.

e-book cover

On the bright side, I can add back the illustrations from the original Writer’s Guide, since I own them. I added out-of-copyright illustrations when I reissued my juvenile biography of Nellie Bly and it came out really well.

So, at long last, here is my question, in multiple parts: Do you prefer print to electronic for nonfiction? Do you give up if it looks like there will be a wait to get a print copy of the book? How much more are you willing to pay for a print copy over an e-book?

Thanks in advance to everyone who weighs in on this issue in the comments section. I’m giving away a free paperback of the Perseverance Press (2008) edition of How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries to one of you. The drawing for the winner works this way: after three days (on June 4), the names from the comments on this post will be written on pieces of paper that are then crumpled and strewn on the floor. The one Shadow pounces on first will get the book. If I have your email address, I’ll contact you. If I don’t, you’ll have to check back here (in the comments) to find out if you’ve won. Best of luck to you all.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others, including several children’s books. 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. Her most recent publications are The Valentine Veilleux Mysteries (a collection of three short stories and a novella, written as Kaitlyn) and I Kill People for a Living: A Collection of Essays by a Writer of Cozy Mysteries (written as Kathy). She maintains websites at www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.

 

Maine Literary Award winner Kathryn Lasky on Switching Genres

From time to time, we like to introduce new Maine authors to our readers. Today we’re delighted to share a post by this year’s Maine Literary  Award winner for Crime Fiction, Kathryn Lasky.

Pitch: What happens when a well-known children’s book author switches genres after decades of writing fantasy and historical fiction for middle grade and young adult readers? Kathryn Lasky the award-winning children’s book author is doing just that. As the author of Guardian of Ga’Hoole the New York Times bestselling series that was turned into a Warner Brothers film The Legend of The Guardians directed by Zack Snyder, she is now writing an adult mystery Light on Bone. The story is set in New Mexico and features Georgia O’Keeffe as an amateur sleuth. This latest mystery of Lasky’s recently won the the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction.

Kathryn Lasky: The first thought that often comes to some people’s minds might be, ‘Wow now you can write about characters who drink, have sex and swear.” True but there is a lot more that makes it very different. The fundamental difference is the perspective and that is what I find most fascinating. When I’m writing children’s books and I am in the mind of say a middle grade kid I have this sort of inner eleven year old that I am filtering things through, or if it’s a YA book an inner teenager. In either case, the perspective is always looking forward to what the possibilities of the years, the life ahead might be. It’s a soft yearning for the future, for power, for independence that subtly colors all. Such is not the case when I’m writing an adult mystery as the protagonist is all grown up.

In the case of Light On Bone set in 1934, the protagonist, Georgia O’Keeffe is in her late forties and as with many of us—who like myself are well beyond our forties—our perspective is often looking back. Back to what could have been, might have happened and yes, how much time do we have left to do it. Time is finite for us, for the characters in an adult book. Time is rarely finite for the central characters of a children’s book. And because children are young, they don’t have as many regrets as an older character, but perhaps a bit more hope. However on the brighter side there is the possibility of renewal. So that in a nutshell is the significant difference between writing for kids and writing for grownups.

And it was renewal that drove Georgia O’Keeffe to the southwest desert in 1934. She had been to New Mexico before but it is the first time she had ever gone to the Ghost Ranch. The ranch would become her residence for six months of the year until she restored a house in the nearby town of Abiquiu more than a decade later.

When Georgia arrived at the Ghost Ranch in 1934 she was fragile and almost broken. She had spent three months in a psychiatric hospital in New York following a complete nervous breakdown after her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s very public affair with Dorothy Norman, a wealthy heiress. It was not simply his infidelity; she had been forced by Stieglitz to have an abortion a few years before. Adding to her misery she had been commissioned to do mural for Radio City Music Hall that been a disaster. The wall for the mural had been poorly prepared and began to disintegrate before she had finished the mural. Somewhat ironically, during this period she was approaching the peak of her career and had just sold a painting for an unheard of sum of money. She had fled to the southwest and found herself rejuvenated.

The narrative begins when she discovers the slain body of a priest in the desert. More murders follow. And there is a burgeoning romance between Georgia and the local sheriff. Add to this mixture an international espionage plot involving Charles Lindbergh (who is staying at the ranch with his wife Anne). And then more bodies turn up ultimately resulting in an unforeseen denouement. Of course, the object as with any mystery is to figure out who did it. That is the whole point of mystery fiction and that differs vastly from the point of children’s novels, unless they are mysteries as well. Children’s novels are more often focused on just getting through life, and not simply avoiding murder.

Solving a crime in a mystery seems easier to me than arriving at a resolution in a children’s book. But this is not what motivated me to go back to mysteries. Yes, almost thirty years ago I had written the Calista Jacobs mysteries series. The central character was in fact a children’s book illustrator. It was fun because I knew a lot about that world. The character was very similar to me—her physical appearance, her sense of humor, her situation. She was a mom like me and her middle grade son play a sidekick role. She lived in a house just like mine, in the same city where I live Cambridge, Massachusetts. But when I stumbled across the idea for Light On Bone I could not have found a character more different from myself than Georgia O’Keeffe.

I had of course always loved O’Keeffe’s paintings but had not really done much research about her life. And I was going to have to. Nowadays I write a lot of animal fantasy for children and I have to do an enormous amount of research. People think ‘oh fantasy you just make it up, right’? Wrong! It’s not anything goes. Luckily I live very close to the Harvard Bio labs and the Harvard Natural History. For my children’s series, The Guardians of Ga’Hoole, that is as about a colony of owls, I spent many hours at Harvard which has one of the largest collections of dead owls anyplace! Yes it used to be legal to shoot them. Now most of the bodies come from disastrous collisions with trucks and cars. I needed to find about their anatomy, their feathers which are very complex, their hunting and mating habits. You just can’t make this stuff up even if it’s a fantasy book.

 Well, I took the same approach to Georgia O’Keeffe –you just can’t make it up. You have to do the research. There was one gem of a fact that I discovered about O’Keeffe. She had an odd perceptual phenomenon known as synesthesia. For Georgia it was a blessing. For an amateur sleuth it would be as well. Synesthesia occurs when stimulation of one sensory, or cognitive pathway, leads to spontaneous experiences in a secondary pathway. Imagine, for example, when a person hears images and sees sound. Or as O’Keeffe herself put it in an interview: “You asked me about music. I like it better than anything in the world—color gives me the same thrill. . .” She could find the equivalents of color, shape, and imagery in music. She would sit and listen to music for hours. Her favorites were Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann, and Bach, as well as Gershwin.

Someone asked me if writing for adults requires the same willing suspension of disbelief as fantasy. It does not at all. Convincing people that an artist like Georgia O’Keeffe can pick up a clue like the glint of a coin in a low-angled sun striking something silver is not hard at all. Convincing a reader that owls do not simply talk but read, do mathematics and forge tools as well as make art is a lot harder and requires a much greater suspension of disbelief.

When Georgia O’Keeffe walked into the desert after her nervous breakdown she discovered a new palette, and I discovered a new protagonist to write about. In certain ways it seemed like a walk in the park after trying to convince readers that owls could in fact do algebra, or that beavers could talk to a swan.

Freedom isn’t Free by Kait Carson

Uncle Karl (1922-1942) and my grandparents

Today is Memorial Day. I thought it appropriate to offer thanks to those men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of their country. Among them, my Uncle Karl who died in 1942 on the USS Quincy in the Battle for Savo Island, and my brother, his namesake, who died in 2021. His death attributed to his service in Viet Nam.

Memorial Day was a big deal when I was growing up. My town was small, a mile deep and a half mile wide. Each Memorial Day it fielded a parade that wound through the town to Memorial Park. At the Park, the Commander of the local American Legion Post read the names of the fallen, followed by a twenty-one-gun salute, and a wreath presentation ceremony. It was a solemn occasion and a celebration of thanks.

The year I was selected to place the wreath on our veterans’ memorial an old man, wearing the uniform of a United States Marine, stepped out of the crowd. He took my arm and led me to the memorial. Together we placed the wreath at the base of the marble column. I thought he stumbled when he half knelt at the foot of the monument and let his fingers rest on a name. Before I could react with Girl Scout first aid, he stood, turned, snapped to attention, and saluted the flag that flew next to the memorial.

The man was Mr. Treple. He had served proudly in WWI as a Marine and lost his only son,

also a Marine, to WWII. His boy child buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Europe then still listed as missing in action and presumed dead. Mr. Treple died later that year but his actions on that long-ago Memorial Day are with me still.

Karl T. Hoyle (1943-2021)

Freedom isn’t free. It is bought and paid for by those who made the ultimate sacrifice and by the families who love them.

Weekend Update: May 27-28, 2023

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Kait Carson (Monday), special guest Kathryn Laskey (Tuesday), Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Thursday), and Kate Flora (Friday).

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

Coming soon (June 9-10): Maine Crime Wave! Lots of Maine Crime Writers will be there. Registration is now open. For more information, click here:

https://www.mainewriters.org/maine-crime-wave

Kate Flora is celebrating the publication of her stand-alone domestic suspense novel, Teach Her a Lesson from Encircle Publications.

Here’s a cool interview with Kate on Lisa Haselton’s blog: https://lisahaselton.com/2023/05/25/interview-with-award-winning-mystery-author-kate-flora/

And in case you’ve missed it, here’s the trailer for the book:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1a0uTlJ3KSy0_7dpOyD4YnWdqlAjQKdVX

 Here are MCW writers Dick Cass and Jule Selbo, and alum Barbara Ross doing a “Making a Mystery” event at the Maine Library Conference.

Interested in doing a pre-pub review for a collection of stories featuring the authors’ series characters? Apply for a review copy here: https://storyoriginapp.com/reviewcopies/808026cc-f036-11ed-a5fc-131a2c071954

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

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words by Matt Cost

A picture is worth a thousand words, or is it? That is the question.

When selling a book, most experts will agree that there are three important components to getting a stranger in the wild to decide that they want to open their wallet or purse to take your cherished work home with them.

The TitleThe Book CoverThe Description

For my historical novels, I’ve tried to give a clear and concise indicator as to the content of the book in the title. I wanted to make sure that the reader clearly understood what they were getting into. (Even if many critics commented that I didn’t mention that Fidel Castro became a hated despot after the conclusion of my Cuban Revolution book.) These books allowed my cover illustrator at Encircle Publications, Deirdre Wait, a high level of creativity to convey to the potential reader what the novel is about.

 

The beginning of my Mainely Mystery series added a needed dimension to the title and the cover art. Mainely has worked out well for me. You can throw Mainely in front of just about anything and it will be immediately found on search engines without being diluted by a multitude of other titles. Power. Fear. Money. Angst. Wicked.

Because the Mainely Mysteries are a series, Deirdre Wait determined it was important to brand the cover art. Having a familiar imagery to the cover that links all of the books together, in this case, a shadowy silhouette Langdon and his canine companion. Then subtle addition to give each title uniqueness. Frozen Maine scene. Downtown Brunswick. A full moon. A bonfire on an island.

The Clay Wolfe Trap series has been more difficult in the title. It seems that many titles end in Trap and it is easy to get lost in the shuffle. Cosmic Trap was originally going to be Honey Trap, but it seems there are tons of books with that name, and most of the covers include half-clothed people. In this series, I have needed unique first words. Wolfe. Mind. Mouse. Cosmic. Pirate. Even if searching Amazon for Mouse Trap still initially goes to… mouse traps.

Deirdre Wait has used a similar branding mechanism for this series. In this case, it is Clay Wolfe and his partner, Baylee Baker, in silhouette, pointing guns in a James Bond sort of look. The backgrounds have been more design oriented to fit the bill of traps.

I look forward to seeing what will happen with my Brooklyn 8 Ballo series. The first one is Velma Gone Awry. Coming next April will be City Gone Askew. It will be interesting to see after that if I am able to continue to brand the titles in similar ways. And of course, I am fascinated to see what the cover artist, Deirdre Wait, for the publisher, Encircle Publications, comes up with to brand and make unique the faces of these books.

Do I think that a picture is worth a thousand words? Not at all. As a writer, I fully believe in the power and impact that can be packed into a thousand words, much less eighty-five thousand words. But to each their own, and a cover is going to grasp the attention of a potential reader much quicker than my thousand words ever would. Thank you to Deirdre Wait for so many fantastic covers to give face to my books.

What is it that you all find important in a title, a cover, and back cover copy?

Write on.

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 four books in the Mainely Mystery series, with the fifth, Mainely Wicked, due out 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.

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.

Pandemic Perspectives

Today, we are delighted to welcome Katherine Hall Page back to blog to talk about her new book, and writing during the pandemic.

Katherine Hall Page: My new book, The Body in the Web is not about being in Maine. It’s about not being in Maine. When we closed up on the Point in October 2019, the idea that we wouldn’t be opening up as usual Memorial Day weekend was as far from our minds as many, many other things would turn out to be. Like my series sleuth Faith Fairchild, who also lives in Massachusetts, there were travel restrictions in place. We could go to Deer Isle but coming back meant quarantining. Never have I blessed technology so much as it allowed me to keep in touch with people. Yet, a long distance love affair is heart-breaking, although it can also be heart-affirming. I was soon treasuring times over sixty-three years spent there, recalling people, adventures, misadventures, landscapes of course and books, going way back to Louise Dickinson Rich’s We Took to the Woods up to all the Crime Writers here plus Joe Coomer and Richard Russo. I pulled the Robert McCloskeys from the shelf and thought about Burt Dow, buried in the same cemetery as my parents. I read Millay’s Renascence aloud and imagined myself looking out across the water toward the Island from the top of Mount Battie. It was a way of coping with the fears, and deprivations of the pandemic.

The Body in the Web (the title refers both to spiders and the worldwide one), begins on January 24, 2021, and ends in May 2022. Here are the first sentences:

 “Faith Fairchild set her phone down with the first sigh of relief she had felt for almost eight months…Such was the effect of the call from her husband Tom, the Reverend Thomas Fairchild, with the stunning news that as one of the local VA hospital’s chaplains he was eligible for vaccination and was on his way to get the shot. A simple sentence, a series of words turned the room from the everyday to a rare setting she would always remember as the beginning flicker of hope.”

After what we had all been through starting in late 2020, knowing that the book would look back (my favorite lawn sign from the time was a homemade one I saw, “2020 Make It Stop!”), I wanted to begin with an expression of that hope. Faith Fairchild and family have formed a Pod with son Ben home from college, daughter Amy a senior in high school and husband Tom, all dealing with their lives remotely. Faith’s catering business is suspended. When a close friend’s death is deemed a suicide, Faith must solve what she knows is a murder remotely as well. She can’t go knock on doors, face suspects eye-to-eye. It became a challenge to unmask while masked!

 I kept a daily journal starting in March 2020 during the pandemic, jotting down a few sentences about things happening in our lives and outside the Pod (three—our son under the same roof happily) ‚ what we ate and how I “foraged” for essentials. Once it was safe to be with people and I started the book, everyone had stories to tell—some tragic, but also many about their ways of managing, ingenious, even humorous. Similar to one of the subplots in the book, I learned about a postponed very elaborate wedding, and plan for a honeymoon baby prompting thorny discussions since no one could pick a new date, for either. Biological clock ticking, baby first? I detailed other issues. Unlike paper goods, there were many shortages, that could not have been predicted— thread since we were all stitching up masks, cream cheese! and the search for yeast alternatives. I’m still making Beer Bread, with all sorts of variations—adding cheese, spices.

I spoke to teachers I know about the difficulty of teaching remotely, particularly when it came to art and music. They are now dealing with how much students lost during the time in isolation, not just academic skills, but social skills. Adults also lost the social ones as I was reminded last summer at an in-person gathering when two different people told me they were having trouble making conversation, small talk, or about larger issues. “I got out of the habit,” one said.

We are still talking about Covid and the Pandemic. And always will, dating things from before, during and after as we did during other devastating times—the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr, the Kennedys, and 9/11. We’ll be living with Covid from now on, getting boosters and telling stories to each other, eventually to those younger who didn’t experience it. It is embedded in our institutional memories forever.

There is one memory that will always be a joyful one— the moment after the long, and very familiar, drive north, finally crossing the 1,088-foot bridge spanning Eggemoggin Reach to Deer Isle! We’d made it safe and sound!

 

Katherine Hall Page is the award-winning writer of the Faith Fairchild series (Wm Morrow/Avon), a recipient of the Agatha for Best First, Best Short Story, and Best Mystery Novel as well as other Agatha, Edgar, Mary Higgins Clark, and Maine Literary Awards nominees. She received Malice Domestic’s Lifetime Achievement Award and another—Crime Master—from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. The Body in the Web is the 26th in the series. She has also published a cookbook, Have Faith in your Kitchen, and books for YAs and Middle Grade readers. A New Jersey native, she lives in Massachusetts and Maine (part of every year since 1858!). www.webmaster@katherine-hall-page.org

Twelve Years in the Making, Teach Her a Lesson Finally Arrives!

Infatuation, threats, and lies are all on the menu in this thriller from Kate Flora. When high school teacher Alexis Jordan becomes the focus of a disturbed teen things quickly spiral out of control. And as the danger intensifies Alexis learns that not all of her friends are allies. With more twists and turns than a mountain highway, Teach Her a Lesson will keep you turning pages late into the night. — Bruce Robert Coffin, award-winning author of the Detective Byron mysteries

Kate Flora: I confess: I am practically dancing in the street I am so happy that Encircle Publications loved the book as much as I do. It has been a long journey to publication. I wish I’d kept better track of the many iterations of this book. Probably they would fill a filing cabinet. It used to be much longer. It used to have another voice character, a sleazy reporter. It has probably been more than twelve years. Over those years, I’ve hired two different editors to help me, editors who wanted to take the book in two very different directions. During those rewrites, trying to respond to their advice, I’ve sometimes felt like I was being pulled in opposite directions. I had to give myself the advice I give other writers: consider the advice but never lose sight of your own intentions for the book.

As the book description says, this is a story that feels pulled from the headlines. A dedicated young teacher willing to give her all for her students is stunned when she’s propositioned by a student she is coaching for his role in a school play. She has no way of knowing that he’s been obsessing about her for months. He’s been studying her, invading her home when she’s not there, building an entire fantasy in which she reciprocates his passion.When she rejects his repeated advances, moving from gentle and polite to firm and angry, he sets out to destroy her. Suddenly, her marriage, her job, and possibly her freedom are at risk when he takes his story to the school administration and then to the police. Abandoned by her husband, frightened, judged, and isolated, she realizes that her student is dangerous. Unable to have what he wants, he will stop at nothing to get revenge. But no one will believe her.

We writers are frequently asked: Where do you get your ideas? I often say from the newspaper. My first Thea Kozak mystery was inspired by an Ann Landers column. This book started when I read a bunch of stories about teachers seducing their students, and I asked: What if it’s the student who is the bad actor? Some early readers found it implausible that a sixteen-year-old boy could possibly be such a schemer. I disagreed. The downside of snowplowing a child’s way through life and giving the message that they should be able to have what they want can be very dangerous. In this story, as you will learn, the boy has a long history of terrible acts, a history which vanishes whenever his protective mother moves him to a new town.

I’m excited to share this book trailer, which I think captures the tension of the book very well. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1a0uTlJ3KSy0_7dpOyD4YnWdqlAjQKdVX

Here’s the buying link: https://amzn.to/3MUvmXL

 

Weekend Update: May 20-21, 2023

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Charlene D’Avanzo (Monday), Maureen Milliken (Tuesday), Kate Flora Book Birthday (Wednesday) Katherine Hall Page guest post (Thursday), and Matt Cost (Friday).

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

Coming soon (June 9-10): Maine Crime Wave! Lots of Maine Crime Writers will be there. Registration is now open. For more information, click here:

https://www.mainewriters.org/maine-crime-wave

 

Save the Date!  Maine Crime Writers Dick Cass, Matt Cost, John Clark, Kate Flora and Maureen Milliken will be at the Belgrade Lakes Village Green Craft Fair from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., Sunday, June 25, in a fundraiser for the Friends of the Belgrade Public Library. Stop by to say hi, check out our books, and enjoy the beautiful Lakes Region and an excellent craft fair.

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

Is It “That” Time Yet?

I was listening to NPR the other day, an interview with Judy Blume, who is much in the news lately for several reasons. A movie has been made of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. In conjunction with that, a documentary of her life, Judy Blume Forever, is forthcoming, as well as adaptations of a couple of her other novels. But the most notable bit of the interview for me was when she confessed that, at 84, she was unlikely to write another novel. ”I’m an extrovert,” she said. “I like people. I don’t want to coop myself up any more.”

At the same time, I’ve been reading Don Winslow’s gangster trilogy, the first two of which, City on Fire and City of Dreams, are out now, with the third and final book due next year. He, too, has publicly announced he’s not writing any more novels. If you’re active on Twitter, you’ve seen him become more and more politically minded, to the extent that he is putting all his energies into activism and political commentary.

And, more worrisome to me, I heard Dennis Lehane say in an interview that he didn’t know if he was going to write more novels, though his new release Small Mercies, is by all accounts an example of him at his best. He did say he would write another if something grabbed him the way this book did, but the notion of quitting?

I spent most of my working life shoehorning my writing in and around a challenging career and family. I write every day and have done for forty-some years. Before I’d heard these people talk about it, I would have said you’d have to pry my pen (keyboard) from my cold dead fingers to make me quit. I didn’t know you could do that.

And yet—age brings a growing awareness of the limited nature of time—my time. All the things I planned to do and haven’t done, the people I’ve sworn to spend time with and haven’t, the other modes of building and creating that attract me. And trout fishing . . .

So maybe at one level I can understand the impulse to step away from a work that is difficult, unheralded for the most part, a work that no one much cares whether you’re doing it, a work without much in the way of tangible recompense. Very few of us are going to make even a small fortune at this, very few of us are going to see much acclaim. It is a temptation, I think, to throw up one’s hands and say Fuck It.

On the other hand—all three of the writers I mentioned have had their work heard, have tasted success in the way the world defines it. Is it easier to give up what you’ve had? In most of our cases, it would be more of a discard of hope.

Then I think of Robert Parker, who literally died at his desk, John Updike revising poems while he was dying of lung cancer. Maybe there is a spark there that cannot give up the ghost.

It’s a conundrum. I love my chicken-scratching, ticky-tacky keyboard tapping too much at the moment to give it up. And I’ve gone without much acclamation for long enough it doesn’t bother me particularly to know I’m unlikely to see the success a Winslow or a Parker saw.

It is the work. Still and now. A former teacher, afflicted with lung cancer, used his limited time to write a memoir of his dying. I have no answers, other than to know that it’s not time to quit yet. Like the urge to write, the urge to quit is personal. And I hope that if I ever do give it up, I’ll be able to do that with the grace of a Judy Blume. It is all any of us wants, I think. The grace to know our own minds.

Advice from ‘Butt In The Chair’ Experts

Sandra Neily Here;

I needed someone wise in my ear this month and a few words of inspiration. Found some!

From Joe Fassler’s interviewing 150 writers:

First Sentence

“The first line must convince me that it somehow embodies the entire unwritten text,” William Gibson said. Stephen King described spending “weeks and months and even years” working on first sentences, each one an incantation with the power to unlock the finished book. And Michael Chabon said that, once he stumbled on the first sentence of Wonder Boys, the rest of the novel was almost like taking dictation. “The seed of the novel—who would tell the story and what it would be about—was in that first sentence, and it just arrived,” he said.

Sound It Out .

“Plot can be overrated. What I strive for more is rhythm,” the late Jim Harrison said. “It’s like taking dictation, when you’re really attuned to the rhythm of that voice.” George Saunders described a similar process, explaining that sound shows him where the energy is, revealing which aspects of the story are important, which lines to follow. It can help with revision, too. “Sound gives us clues about what is necessary and real,” he said. “When you read [your work] aloud, there are parts you might skip over—you find yourself not wanting to speak them. Those are the weak parts. It’s hard to find them otherwise, just reading along.”

Stubborn Gladness

Elizabeth Gilbert’s concept of “stubborn gladness,” a term she borrows from the poet Jack Gilbert. It’s a promise to take things in stride, to remain cheerfully engaged no matter how difficult things get. “My path as a writer became much more smooth,” she said, “when I learned, when things aren’t going well, to regard my struggles as curious, not tragic.”

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From tips from Nobel Prize winners:

“The Canadian author Alice Munro, who was given the Nobel for Literature in 2013: ‘Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn’t have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them … add to this, you could keep a voice recorder or use the voice note function on a smartphone to record ideas or sentences for your novel as they occur to you. This will help you keep creating even when you have fewer moments to sit down and write.’

The Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. The celebrated author of novels such as Cien años de soledad (translated as A Hundred Years of Solitude) was also a journalist.  ‘In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.’

The Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, who published over 30 novels, plays and essays, received the Nobel in 2010. ‘If I started to wait for moments of inspiration, I would never finish a book. Inspiration for me comes from a regular effort.’

The great Canadian-American author Saul Bellow, who published 14 novels and novellas and won the Nobel for writing in 1976, beautifully described the intimacy between the writer and the reader: ‘When you open a novel — and I mean of course the real thing — you enter into a state of intimacy with its writer. You hear a voice or, more significantly, an individual tone under the words … It is more musical than verbal, and it is the characteristic signature of a person, of a soul. Such a writer has power over distraction and fragmentation, and out of distressing unrest, even from the edge of chaos, he [or she] can bring unity and carry us into a state of intransitive attention. People hunger for this.’ ”

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More Wisdom….

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”—Joan Didion

“Instructions for living a life:

pay attention
be astonished
tell about it”    —Mary Oliver

“Your day’s work might turn out to have been a mess. So what? Vonnegut said, ‘When I write I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.’ So go ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Use lots of paper. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friends.” —Anne Lamott

“Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” —Annie Dillard

And From Stephen King:

“2nd draft = 1st draft – 10%” Every story and novel is collapsible to some degree. If you can’t get out ten per cent of it while retaining the basic story and flavor, you’re not trying very hard.”

“Stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”

“There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers . . . two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

“The adverb is not your friend. . . . I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest…[I]t seems to me that every book — at least every one worth reading — is about something. Your job during or just after the first draft is to decide what something or somethings yours is about. Your job in the second draft — one of them, anyway — is to make that something even more clear. This may necessitate some big changes and revisions. The benefits to you and your reader will be clearer focus and a more unified story. It hardly ever fails.”

 

And finally:  “The joy of being an author is the joy of feeling I can do anything,” says Neil Gaiman in Light the Dark. “There are no rules. Only: can you do this with confidence? Can you do it with aplomb? Can you do it with style? Can you do it with joy?”

The second Mystery in Maine, Deadly Turn, was published in 2021. Her 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. Find her novels at all Shermans Books (Maine) and on Amazon. Find more info on Sandy’s website.