Lea Wait's Blog, page 75

Weekend Update: October 1-2, 2022

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Monday), Kate Flora (Tuesday), John Clark (Thursday), and Brenda Buchanan (Friday).

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

A chance to meet some Maine Crime Writers here at the Newport Cultural Center:

And coming October 18th . . . at long last 

 

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

“True” Crime Fiction

I recently watched the latest Elvis film, titled, um, Elvis, featuring Austin Butler in the lead and Tom Hanks as the villain, Colonel Tom Parker.

While Butler is a terrific Elvis, Hanks pulls off a remarkable transformation from beloved actor to the compellingly grotesque figure of Colonel Parker. “Explore Entertainment” describes Hanks as “trussed up under layers of costuming and make-up, bloated and reptilian, with a strange, slightly Dutch accent, and pulling the strings as the carnival barker-turned-talent manager who made Elvis into a star.”

Elvis got me thinking about crime fiction based on actual historic events.

Most famous, perhaps, is Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express. Inspired by the 1932 Lindbergh baby’s kidnapping, Christie imagined a long-delayed plot for justice that has become one of her most admired stories – and the perfect set-piece for detective Hercule Poirot.

Dorothy Sayer’s Strong Poison, the whodunit-howdunnit, introduces readers to Harriet Vane who is wrongly accused of poisoning her lover with arsenic. Lord Peter Wimsey ultimately proves Vane innocent and, well, you really must read the book to see what happens. Strong Poison is based on the trial of the only UK solicitor ultimately executed for murder in 1922. When Herbert Rouse Armstrong was arrested on New Year’s Eve, he actually had a packet of arsenic in his pocket – a detail Sayers’ borrows in her novel.

No literary true crime list would be complete without Truman Capote’s 1966 “nonfiction novel” about the brutal murder of a Kansas family in 1959. In Cold Blood is a page-turner that honors the victims while also displaying empathy for the perpetrators.

My own mysteries are based on actual environmental events and crimes. For example, Secrets Haunt The Lobsters’ Sea is based on the rough-and-tumble domain of the state’s signature fishery in which lobstermen sometimes practice their own rule of law.

I’ll end with Into The Wild, Jon Krakauer’s tale of a young man, the well off Christopher Johnson McCandless, who hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness. Months late moose hunters found his decomposed body. How McCandless came to die is the remarkable story of Into The Wild. A Hampshire College alum (where I taught for over 20 years), Krakauer was awarded an Academy Award in Literature. Into The Wild became a #1 New York Times bestseller and was translated into more than twenty-five languages. It was also Time’s Book of the Year, and was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

Tree Stands. Rotting Donuts. Lynx Poop. Environmental Grief.

After two major surgeries in less than a year (a new heart valve and knee replacement) I was surprised to realize how much I missed the characters and dog I’d created.

[image error]Next to my daughter and her grandgirls of course. I missed them most of all.[image error]

How to return to my third writing effort with so much time off recovering and feeling … to be honest … depressed?

Immersion seemed like a good idea. I reread my last novel, Deadly Turn, and took notes like it was a class. A class in the novel’s Voice. In my unique characters. In plotting that could carry the novel and each page. In desires, big and little and huge. (Each page should have something someone wants, even a glass of water.)

my plot map

I pulled out my plot map of highs and lows and tweaked what I thought might be a different climax.

Map of Deadly Assault terrain

I updated the map of the novel’s territory I’d created months before.

I made a list of possible perpetrators as, like before, I have several characters audition during the novel to be the ‘bad guy.’

screen saver picture for Deadly Trespass

I remembered that I needed an animal on my screen to draw me back to the essence of the[image error] story. For each novel I’ve had a picture that opens in-my-face, telling me to get It DONE! Wolves were the reminder on Deadly Trespass, my first novel.

The eagle (piercing eyes) was for Deadly Turn.

 

And now for Deadly Assault, I’ve put up an otter but some days there’s a salamander.

 

I’d written six chapters before my last surgery. And these words I now share are where I picked up the story.

First, a flashback to introduce the tree stand built by her old wildlife biologist boss, Ken. Then Chapter Six finds Patton alone at the tree, hiding out with her dog, Pock.

[Note: When I am writing and have an idea or something I want to fix, I put it in bold and keep going.]

*********************

After I’d crawled onto a small porch and sent the harness back down, I stood and stared. It wasn’t the usual tree stand thrown together with wood scraps or bought from a catalogue that offered a tiny, flimsy place to sit. It was a real tree house—an impregnable fort of wide floor boards surrounded by a rugged railing, topped by a metal roof and equipped with a bunk bed nailed into the trunk, two small folding chairs, and a contraption for collecting rain water. Glassed in hole to see below???

The bucket in the corner had to be the toilet. I decided I was going to get to know Ken very well.

He panted as he arrived and turned to hoist up my dog. “I like to stay up here for days. Everyone shows up if I’m quiet.” Everyone meant every animal.

Usually, tree stands overlook game trails used by generations of deer or bear hunters hoping for regular animal habits. Bear hunters, however, didn’t trust bears to just show up so they left buckets of ageing donuts and pastries weeks before the season and then waited to see who’d developed a sugar habit.

Ken’s tree house was only for wildlife voyeurism. Spotting scope tripods were nailed to each railing and after I screwed on a scope, I liked Ken even more. His tree house surveyed all the forest we could see and all homes and haunts different animals favored.

Dense groves of spruce and fir offered up sanctuary and hidden travel routes. Patches of regrowing, tasty brush meant tender twigs in winter and yummy buds in spring and lots of snowshoe hare. Lots of hare meant a lynx probably hunted within Ken’s view. A few grass clearings sloped toward a cedar swamp fed by a clear stream of green pools. Private trout I thought.

“As high as the Eiffel Tower is,” Ken said “that’s how far we can … “

I interrupted. “That how far you can see as animals go about their food and shelter business. I get it.”

Ken’s smile meant I’d passed an important test.

Chapter Six

Without Ken and weak from months lying around, I didn’t know if I could pass the hoist-the dog-sitting-in-the-lap test. It was almost dark so I rummaged through my pack for my headlamp to study the cable system. Pulley systems are designed to distribute weight so someone can pull more weight than they had any right to lift.

Multiple pullies zigzagging back and forth like a giant Z in a barn loft had once saved my life when I felt wolf breath hot on my ankles. I hoped I hadn’t used up my Z-drag karma. I strapped myself into the harness.

“This is your one shot,” I said to Pock, sticking a dog biscuit behind each ear.  “Either you climb into my lap now, or you’re down here for the night where you’ll get freaked out. I have a sleeping bag and will share it. Just eat the biscuits on your way up.”

It’s a miracle neither of us died tangled in the rigging as after Pock ate the biscuits, he decided he was done with the entire process and made a massive leap from my lap onto the bit of deck that was a porch. Before I could strip off the harness, he was back behind my legs in a crouch. I played my headlight into branches above us and found eyes.

*****************

And here are the end-of-day notes for this session, left to help me get started … next time.

Lynx poop on deck. It’s black, tubular tapered and smelly, same as bobcat. Lynx conversation? Calls in Barred Owl.

Crowded with dog on bunk in sleeping bag. What does she hear? Smell? Too dark to see so she mentally inventories everything that will end when the road and condos replace this place. (Fossil rock. Moose bog. Moss empire.) No animal boundaries in woods. Not like No Trespassing signs to come that slice up it artificially.

BRING THE PAIN; GRIEF FOR WHAT’S LOST.  How to live with environmental grief? With what’s lost or about to be.

*************

Well, maybe that’s a question many, many of us are asking. I intend to tackle it in this novel, Deadly Assault.

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 2023. Find her novels at all Shermans Books (Maine) and on Amazon. Find more info on Sandy’s website.

 

The Ties Between Eugenics and Genome Editing by Matt Cost

Ken Burns is on to something. But I beat him to the punch. In his new documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, he delves into the influence that America had on the Nazi Party and Adolph Hitler through the study and implementation of the Eugenics Movement.

This past April, I published Mouse Trap, which I began writing in December of 2020. As my mysteries often do, the plot began as one thing and morphed into another beast entirely. As I dug further into the topic of genetic engineering, currently being experimented on with mice, I realized how much bigger this topic really was.

The stated goal is to eradicate disease such as diabetes, cancer, etc. The reality is that the first genetically altered baby was born in the U.S. twenty-two years ago. Since then, new technology, such as CRISPR has been designed to improve this process, and while the FDA frowns upon genome editing on live human embryos, there is little teeth to their position, as the science is outpacing the law.

The reality is that the science is out there to create babies with specific eye color, hair color, (skin color?), body shape, increased mental facilities, and improved physical prowess. With the backing of a wealthy benefactor, the very real possibility of a secret lab creating superbabies does exist.

But this is not something new. It all started in the late 19th century and really began to pick up speed at the turn of the century. In the United States of America. With the Eugenics Movement. In my current WIP, City Gone Askew, 8 Ballo becomes enmeshed in this fraudulent science that attempts to eradicate criminals, the feeble minded (as they termed it), and undesirables such as Blacks, Jews, Italians, and many more.

On the surface, the way toward achieving a purer (their word, not mine) American race was to be through forced sterilization and stringent immigration laws (the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act). These scientific and medical procedures and experiments were supported by many wealthy families of the time such as Carnegie, Harriman, Rockefeller, and Ford. The few dissenting scientist and doctor voices were drowned out in a tidal wave of support.

In Mouse Trap, Clay Wolfe discovers a secret genetic engineering lab, which has come full circle from the Eugenics Movement that 8 Ballo is thrown into in City Gone Askew. Discovering and learning about fascinating subjects such as this is one of the pieces of writing that enthralls me the most, even it often scares me to the core.

When is it time to say enough when trying to improve humanity? When does it go too far? What, really, is an improvement? These are difficult questions that we face today, but they certainly are not new. Being knowledgeable about eugenics and genetic engineering are far too important to not pay attention to.

Next up? Unidentified Aerial Phenomena coming this December!

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 writes the Mainely Mystery series. The first book, MAINELY POWER, was selected by the Maine Humanities Council as the fiction book of the year for 2020. The third, MAINELY MONEY, was a finalist for a Silver Falchion Award.

Cost also writes the Clay Wolfe/Port Essex mystery series. The second book, MIND TRAP, is up for a RONE award from InD’tale Magazine. The fourth book, COSMIC TRAP, is due out in December.

Historical fiction novels have covered such diverse topics as Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War, and the fight for equality in New Orleans during Reconstruction.

In April of 2023, VELMA GONE AWRY will be published. It is a blend of Cost’s love of histories and mysteries about Hungarian PI 8 Ballo set in 1923 Brooklyn, NY.

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.

TL;DR Publishing is Weird

Thanks to all who turned out for the launch Wednesday night at Longfellow Books. Great fun, excellent cake, and an outstanding conversation with interviewer extraordinaire Katrina Niidas-Holm. I’m continuing the donation scheme I announced that night through the end of the year. For each copy of The Last Altruist, I will donate one dollar to a donation to the Matinicus Island Library, in honor of their commitment to providing banned books in their stacks. I’m not going to check receipts—if you tell me you bought it, I’ll take your word for it.

Ran into some interesting information about book sales and publishing last week. Not our usual fare, but I suspect there’s some interest in what actually happens in the publishing world, as opposed to the myths and assumptions running around.

The source of this information is the Senior Analyst for BookScan, which is part of the NPD Group, a large nationwide company that does market research and trendspotting in various businesses. So it’s about as legit as we’re going to get without actually seeing the balance sheets. It’s long, but as someone trying to participate in this market, I found it fascinating.

Much of this is quoted directly from comments the analyst provided online, in response to an ongoing discussion of the Penguin/Simon and Schuster antitrust trial. (I’ve redacted her name.) The original article can be found at https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-dozen.

Hey y’all, it’s xxxxx, lead industry analyst from NPD BookScan. I thought I would chime in with some numbers here, since that statistic from the DOJ is super-misleading, and I’m not sure where it originally came from, since we did not provide it directly. 

NPD BookScan (BookScan is owned by The NPD Group, not Nielsen, BTW), collects data on print book sales from 16,000 retail locations, including Amazon print book sales. Included in those numbers are any print book sales from self-publishing platforms where the author has opted for extended distribution and a print book was sold by Amazon or another retailer. So that 487K “new book” figure is all frontlist books in our data showing at least 1 unit sale over the last 52 weeks coming from publishers of all sizes, including individuals.

Because this is clearly a slice, and most likely provided by one of the parties to the suit, I decided to limit my data to the frontlist sales for the top 10 publishers by unit volume in the U.S. Trade market. My ISBN list is a little smaller than the one quoted in the DOJ, but the principals will be the same. 

The data below includes frontlist titles from Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmillan, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and John Wiley. The figures below only include books published by these publishers themselves, not publishers they distribute.

Here is what I found. Collectively, 45,571 unique ISBNs appear for these publishers in our frontlist sales data for the last 52 weeks (thru week ending 8-24-2022).

In this dataset:

>>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more

>>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies

>>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies

>>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies

>>>5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies

>>>21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies

>>>51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies

>>>14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies

So, only about 15% of all of those publisher-produced frontlist books sold less than 12 copies. That’s not nothing, but nowhere as janky as what has been reported.

BUT, I think the real story is that roughly 66% of those books from the top 10 publishers sold less than 1,000 copies over 52 weeks. (Those last two points combined)

And less than 2% sold more than 50,000 copies. (The top two points)

Now data is a funny thing. It can be sliced and diced to create different types of views. For instance we could run the same analysis on ALL of those 487K new books published in the last 52 weeks, which includes many small press and independently published titles, and we would find that about 98% of them sold less that 5,000 copies in the “trade bookstore market” that NPD BookScan covers. (I know this IS a true statistic because that data was produced by us for The New York Times.)

But that data does not include direct sales from publishers. It does not include sales by authors at events, or through their websites. It does not include eBook sales which we track in a separate tool, and it doesn’t include any of the amazing reading going on through platforms like Substack, Wattpad, Webtoons, Kindle Direct, or library lending platforms like OverDrive or Hoopla. 

BUT, it does represent the general reality of the ECONOMICS of the publishing market. In general, most of the revenue that keeps publishers in business comes from the very narrow band of publishing successes in the top 8-10% of new books, along with the 70% of overall sales that come from BACKLIST books in the current market. (Backlist books have gained about 4% in share from frontlist books since the pandemic began, but that is a whole other story.)

The long and short of it is publishing is very much a gambler’s game, and I think that has been clear from the testimony in the DOJ case. It is true that most people in publishing up to and including the CEOs cannot tell you for sure what books are going to make their year. The big advantage that publisher consolidation has brought to the top of the market is deeper pockets and more resources to roll those dice. More money to get a hot project. More money to influence outcomes through marketing, more access to sales and distribution mechanisms, and easier access to the gatekeepers who decide what books make it onto retailers’ shelves. And better ability to distribute risk across a bigger list of gambles.

It is largely a numbers game and I’m not just saying that because I’m a numbers gal. It’s a tough business.

Hope this has been helpful—back to our regularly scheduled topics next time.

Weekend Update: September 24-25, 2022

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Dick Cass (Monday), Matt Cost (Tuesday), and Charlene D’Avanzo (Thursday).

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

From Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: The big news at our house is that my husband’s first full length fiction is now available as an e-book. Well, Hell: The Yarns of Bobby Wing, Constable of Skedaddle Gore, Maine, had its origin in three short stories that appeared in three successive editions of Best New England Crime Stories. The protagonist, Bobby, moved to Skedaddle Gore when he retired from the Coast Guard and accepted the job as constable because the extra income would help cover his tab at Sally’s Motel and Bar and Live Bait and Convenience Store. The job description was vague: just handle the “little things” that come up from time to time. He doesn’t carry a badge or a gun and isn’t allowed to arrest anyone, but somehow those “little things” end up including everything from a severed head to a body on ski lift. But don’t worry. It’s not all murder and mayhem. There’s plenty of Maine humor, too. Here are the links to buy the e-book:https://books2read.com/u/mZEeLp

 Kate Flora: I just recorded a podcast for Murder We Write. A lot of fun. If you’re interested in some of my thoughts on writing, and upcoming books, you can find it here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-we-write-episode-2/id1635664204?i=1000580133927

 

 

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

Joyce? Wordsworth? They’re just like us!

For several years, I was a judge in nationwide self-published book contest. I was a first-tier judge, which meant I read a hundred or more books, sending one for every batch of 25 back  to the next tier. Duties included ranking each on a 1-5 scale for several criterea (character development, structure, grammar, etc), and also giving a 200 to 300-word critique. (Top tip: If you’re self publishing, pay for an editor, for the love of god). I always used the “critique sandwich” approach — positive opening, the real criticism, positive ending. Example: “You obviously worked very hard on this book… to bring it up to the next level, you may want to consider… you should be proud of your accomplishment.”

James Joyce and me in Dublin.

Sometimes — often — it was very hard to find positive things to say. One memorable one that I struggled with was a stream of consciousness mish-mash with no attention to the rules of punctuation, spelling, sentence structure, or anything else that resembled writing. The writer responded to my critique (an option they had but, in my memory, only two writers — both male and jarringly bad — used). His reply was, basically, “James Joyce wrote like this and he was considered a genuis!”

My rule with that contest was the same as when I was a newspaper editor — if I got a ridiculous email from someone who just didn’t get it, they got one brief and to-the-point response. To this fellow, I wrote something like, “Joyce understood the rules enough to know how to break them.” (Not that this is what this is about, but another tip for aspiring writers: Know the rules in and out before you break them, and if you do, have a plan for it. Don’t just break them because you’re too lazy to write correctly.)

I knew what I spoke of regarding Joyce — one piece of my very excellent liberal arts education was a semester on Joyce from one of the top Joyce scholars of the era. I’m embarrassed to say that the professor, Ed Callahan (who I also had for Shakespeare), was awesome, but I struggled mightily to understand what I was reading and I likely got a bad grade. I plan to revisit Joyce now that I’m older, smarter and on ADHD medication.

I enjoyed being an English major. Besides critical thinking skills and all sorts of stuff about literature and writing, I also learned things that no one in high school ever told me. Thoreau thought Walt Whitman was a slob! Thoreau, while “roughing it” at Walden Pond would go to the Emerson’s for lunch every day, where Mrs. Emerson would cook him a nice hot meal! Etc. I don’t rememember learning anything like that about Joyce, though. So I was delighted to learn, when I was in Dublin and visited the fantastic (but flawed) brand-new Museum of Literature in Ireland, that Joyce was, well… kind of whiner.

Joyce complaining about his publisher to Yeats.

The museum has an entire floor dedicated to Dublin’s favorite writer — as it should. Among the exhibits are letters he wrote to W.B. Yeats complaining about his publisher and asking for help.

In one he complains that the potential publisher refused to publish his book “The Dubliners,” then sold it back to him, but the printer destroyed all the copies. I look at this letter as just softening Yeats up, because the next letter, written on Christmas day no less, asks Yeats to help him get the book published.

The exhibits imply the two guys didn’t know each other well, but were acquainted. I can picture Yeats sitting there saying, “WTF, can’t this guy get a grip? I have my own issues to deal with!” One of the flaws of the museum — a blog post for another day — is that they have very little on Yeats. So we don’t know how he felt about Joyce.

Joyce closing the deal by asking Yeats for help.

But, as we all know, Joyce eventually got the attention he deserved, whether Yeats helped him out or not.

A week or so after my visit to Dublin, I was in England’s Lake District (it was a great trip with my sister Liz — another blog post for another day), and visited Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum. It was interesting to see that Wordsworth, too, had written whiney letters to people of influence complaining about publishers and more.

Don’t worry, I did have more takeaways about these two writers than the whininess. For instance, as I read Wordsworth’s “Boat Stealing,” part of his major work “The Prelude,” I had a strong flashback to my Introduction to Poetry Class first semester of freshman year in college  43 years ago (yes, I was an English major), and the startling revelation that A LOT of poems are about sex. Here’s an excerpt from that poem:

And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again…

See? It’s not just about the boat! Something stirred in me as I read it. No, not that. It was the realization that, nearly 40 years after graduating from college and 43 years after I took the class, I was remembering and drawing on something specific I’d learned. It’s always nice to feel that the money both I and the American taxpayers spent on those four years is paying off. (Though more like two years for the taxpayers, since Reagan decimated financial aid programs when I was mid-way through).

I no longer have the book with “Boat Stealing,” but here’s proof that, yes, I did pay at least minimal attention in college.

I even looked for the textbook with “Boat Stealing” when I got home (because yes, I’m a dork who saved some of my college textbooks), but I no longer have it. I did, however, find my notes on another Wordsworth poem, which, unininspiring as they are, showed I was at least paying enough attention to know that it would be on the final.

I found it interesting that both Joyce and Wordsworth had women at their beck and call who typed, mailed, compiled, soothed, cooked, gave ideas to, allowed the guy to take snippets of their own writing as his, etc. It reminded me a little of my mother’s refrain: “I notice a lot of writers have husbands or wives who work, so they have health insurance and can take time to write…” Thanks Mom! In 2022, I don’t see getting married as a solution to finding time to write. I think the picking up dirty socks, trying to tune out the NFL or “Game of Thrones” or whatever other random thing is constantly droning on the TV, negotiating meal content, and all the other aspects of living with another person would negate any “writing time” I would gain. And the Affordable Care Act is treating me better as far as health care goes than any employer-based insurance I’ve had in the past decade. Sorry, digressing!

Back yard of Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s home in Grasmere, England. Nice place, but would’ve been a little crowded for my taste.

In Wordsworth’s defense, I shudder to think of how crowded his sweet little Dove Cottage must’ve been with his wife, sister, various friends and hangers-on, and growing brood of what eventually became five kids all crammed in. Though they moved to a bigger place after kid no. 3. Oh, and he had a bequest from a friend who’d died that allowed him to live comfortably while he wrote, with the proviso that his sister live with him and be taken care of. That sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, wasn’t a bad writer herself. And as I touched on earlier, she and Wordsworth’s wife, Mary, did a lot of his heavy lifting, including transcribing all his writing, walking four miles one-way to the post office in Ambleside to mail stuff for him, letting him use their ideas, and more. So he got the better of the deal.

But I digress again.

I knew traveling to the homes of some of the greatest writers the world has ever known would be motivating as I struggle along finishing my own book. But the best motivation was that no matter how great they were, they were people, too, with issues and insecurities of their own. And yet they got it done. A lesson for us all.

Now, if any of you guys happen to have Yeats’ mailing address, could you send it along? Just want to drop him a little note…

Earlate Bloomer

I have a major milestone birthday coming up, which has led me to reflect on my very circuitous path to publishing. I graduated from high school when I was fifteen, college at 19. Rather unbelievably, I was offered a job teaching second grade in a Lower East Side special service K-5 school (i.e., a school in a profoundly disadvantaged neighborhood, where just about every single kid qualified for free lunch/milk). I turned 20 a month after I began.

This hiring was not because I was such a brilliant, big-hearted young woman. There was a dire teachers’ shortage in New York City at the time. Virtually anyone with a functioning heartbeat and a modicum of (in)sanity was accepted to an accelerated education training program at NYU the summer before school started.

Armed with six weeks of instruction, colorful mini-dresses, a stash of Mallomars for snack time, and an overly optimistic attitude, I wandered into P.S. 64 and tried to make a difference. I think I probably learned more than the kids did those two years, and the experience left a lasting impression.

Some disturbing highlights (lowlights?):

There were several pregnant fourth and fifth grade girls each year, which was incredibly awful.

The assistant principal said I smiled too much. A successful teacher didn’t smile until after Thanksgiving. I found that to be an impossible (and abhorrent) goal.

The janitor got furious when I stayed after school to work. He said the empty building was too dangerous, and he didn’t want to be responsible for my safety. I could be raped or at the very least robbed. Why, just the other day someone had come in with a machete, so I could be chopped up too.

One day during school hours the door opened (Some days we were instructed to lock ourselves in, but not that particular morning.). A rock sailed through to the back of the classroom, fortunately missing any little heads. Attached to it with a rubber band was a note: Benny can’t come to school today because he has no shoes.

A discussion about trick or treating devolved into how many scary men the kids had seen in their hallways, not in costumes, but with needles in their arms.

Speaking of health, I caught chicken pox the first year and German measles the second.

But there are many better memories. Second graders are still very reachable and teachable—it’s a wonderful age, where the hard part is over and the hardest part is yet to come. They sometimes brought in their own books for story time—Spanish books. I’d taken French and German in school, so my relevant language skills were nada. But the class complemented my accent, even if I didn’t understand what I was reading.

The kids always brought me presents, some used, and some not. Someone gave me a see-through orange baby doll nightgown. New, thank heavens. I got lots of cute china knickknacks, too.

One year I had a Maria, a Marisol, a Maritza, a Magallis, and a Maribel to keep straight. As a Maggie/Margaret, I almost fit right in.

I learned to say, “Mira, mira!” when I wanted attention.

Before this job, I was used to being the youngest person in the room/group. Time eventually caught up with me. I got married, had kids, moved around the eastern seaboard with a brief detour to Ohio, had lots of varied work situations. Life rolled along, and I got a little itchy. What happened to the girl who worked on the high school yearbook and newspaper, the one who’d made the college English honorary society?

I started to write for real. My first book was published when I was 62, a time when most folks are ready to retire and wear a nightgown all day (though not see-through, and definitely not orange). This writing gig has added a whole other element to my dusty resume, and made me realize it’s never, ever too late to try something new.

And now…do you know what I’d really like to do? You’ll probably never guess—play the drums. I doubt Santa, being a sensible and frugal older gentleman, will bring me a drum kit for the garage. Hitting stuff would surely aggravate my arthritis, and the noise would make me deafer than ever and annoy the neighbors. But I can enjoy YouTube drummers rocking out.

Were you an early bloomer, late bloomer, or a hybrid? What crazy ambition do you have?

For more scintillating info, please visit www.maggierobinson.net

Where Does A Book Begin?

Kate Flora: I was at a dinner party in Boston last night to celebrate my friend Laura’s sixty-fifty birthday. During dinner, we were talking about writing and her son asked me “Where does a book begin?”  The answer, of course, is all over the place. Different books have different origins or inspirations. Sometimes the book begins with something I see, or overhear. Sometimes from a story someone tells me. Sometimes it begins with two or three small ideas I’ve thought about and saved come together and suddenly I can see a beginning

I came home from that lovely dinner still pondering the question and I didn’t sleep well because the answer intrigued me more than sleep. I kept tossing and turning as more answers to his question keep arising. For example, my first Thea Kozak mystery, Chosen for Death, was inspired by an Ann Landers column. The writer had written to Ann, saying that years ago, she had gotten pregnant at a time when a huge social stigma attached to unwed pregnancy. She had gone to a home for unwed mothers, had the baby,  given it up for adoption, and been told to go on and live her life as though the baby had never happened. That it would be her secret. The writer went on to say she’d just been contacted by that child, now an adult, who wanted to meet her. She reported that she lived in a conservative community, had other children, and her husband didn’t know about this child. She didn’t want her secret revealed. What should she do?

For me, as a writer, there was everything I needed for a book in that one letter. A long-kept secret whose revelation would disrupt a life and a marriage, and the question of what lengths a person might go to to keep that secret. A young woman who’d always wanted to know why she wasn’t wanted and whether there were people–a family–who were like her. The story was Thea’s sister Carrie’s, but I needed a protagonist to tell it, and Thea was born.

Joe Burgess, protagonist of my first police procedural Playing God, was born at the now-defunct Mid-Atlantic Mystery Conference in Philadelphia. I was meeting a detective from Newark, Delaware for breakfast. He’d become an internet penpal when I was seeking information from a forensics forum about doing an exhumation of a buried body. At that breakfast, he told me about a case in his town where two college students, she pregnant, he the father, dealt with their unwanted child by meeting at a motel in Newark, delivering the baby, killing it, leaving it in a dumpster, and going back to their respective schools. The heart of his story, for me, was the impact that investigating that case had on the primary detective. He was then the father of a young baby himself, and finding that tiny body, matching the wound on the child’s head to furniture in the room, and then dealing with a case where politics trumped justice. The impact on the detective was so severe he had a heart attack and had to retire.

Pondering on that, a detective deeply careworn and damaged by decades of the terrible things people did to each other, was born. Grouchy, solitary, with the hide of a rhinoceros, but still with chinks that made him vulnerable, Joe Burgess was a detective I, and I hope my reader, could care about. But the idea of him, like yeast beginning to work, was born at that breakfast.

One of the stories I told my friend’s son was about one of my “books in the drawer,” those that are still unpublished. Character and story do, literally, come in my sleep. In this case, in The Darker the Night, the detective, Rick O’Leary, literally came into my mind, sat down beside me on a barstool, and began to talk. I was fascinated by who he was, what had shaped him, and what was the story being that moment on the barstool.

O’Leary tossed back the shot of Jack, landing the empty glass a little unsteadily on the bar where it joined three others. A quartet, he thought idly. A fucking drunkard’s quartet. He squinted his eyes and stared at the line of glasses, smudgy golden gleams in the bar’s soft light. They weren’t going to make music for him tonight. Or do anything else for that matter. It was one of those perfectly fucked-up nights when he knew however many of these he drank, there would be no nirvana. No moments of drunken happiness. No wave of blessed relief from the darkness inside his head.

So, fellow writers, a bit of advice, if you’re interested. Since inspiration for stories can come from anywhere, try to be open to them. It may be a scrap of conversation overheard at Dunkin’ Donuts or in the next dressing room. It might be something you see while driving, like a car parked in an unusual place with all four doors open and no one around. It might be something you read in the paper, like that Ann Landers column. It might be a story someone tells you. Wondering “what’s that about” is something we do all the time. Taking a scrap and asking the “What if” questions can lead to a new character, situation or story. And if some character wants to interrupt your sleep, sit down on a barstool, and tell you about themselves? Wake up and listen.

The photo I couldn’t help taking. Actually two shrubs shrouded in plastic to protect my car, but looking like something else entirely.

 

 

Weekend Update: September 17-18, 2022

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Kate Flora (Monday), Maggie Robinson (Tuesday), Sandra Neily (Thursday), and Maureen Milliken (Friday).

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

Vaughn C Hardacker will sell and sign books at Gentile Hall in the University of Maine, Presque Isle as part of Homecoming Weekend on September 24.

 

 

 

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